Working in sales can be an incredibly rewarding experience, especially if you have the right personality for it. If you like talking to people and helping them find solutions to their problems, then this is the right job for you. It also helps if you are competitive and driven, and if you love the idea of constantly overcoming challenges and developing your skills.
That being said, simply having the right personality for the job doesn’t necessarily mean that you have everything you need to do it well. There are so many misconceptions when it comes to selling that even the most experienced salespeople make mistakes and fall into bad habits.
Here’s what you need to know about the essentials of being a good salesperson.
Personalize the Experience
When making cold calls or sending cold emails, a number of salespeople make the mistake of focusing too much on themselves and their company. They will go on about what their company has to offer but fail to acknowledge the needs of the prospect.
What’s worse is that many of these cold attempts often lack any sort of personalization. Any sort of communication with your prospects should be custom-tailored to their profile. The best sales emails that convert successfully are the ones that mention the prospect’s name as well as any relevant personal information.
For example, you could mention things like:
- Recent news or events related to their company
- Comments or insights related to a social media post they shared or wrote
- A mutual connection or referral
- Information on how you can help them resolve a specific problem that they have
- How you can offer them solutions for their whole organization
It’s all about personalizing the experience for the prospect so that you can successfully catch their interest. Otherwise, you’re just another email or another phone call that is annoyingly trying to sell them something and are easy to ignore.
Producing a relationship with your prospect is more likely to land you a sale because buying decisions are the product of emotion. The more you get to know your prospect, the more you’ll know about what sort of emotions drive their decisions to make a purchase. And that all starts with inviting them to have a relationship with you that feels authentic and one-on-one.
Do Your Homework
Using sales scripts and email and SMS templates is great for saving time, but the quality of communication will be cut down unless you customize these templates to whoever you’re contacting. Do your research first about your contact, and if you have the software, make sure you’re using it to help you automatically populate personal information into the templates.
But even if you have the information there automatically for you, it’s important that you absorb it for yourself and that you actually know when making a cold call – otherwise, the prospect will be able to tell right away that you’re reading a script.
Remember, authenticity and trust are important to present-day consumers. If you come off as inauthentic and impersonal, they’ll simply skip you over for the next best salesperson.