There are still a lot more ways salespeople can stand out in sales in order to improve their closing rates, build better relationships, and hit their sales goals. Here are 9 more ways you can leave a great impression in sales today.

Be Goal-Oriented, Regardless of The Circumstances

Your goals are what will take you from point A to point B. Planning, setting and taking action towards your goals is what’s necessary to progress in your career, your work, and your business.

But something a lot of salespeople forget is to continue with their goal focus, regardless of the circumstances.

More often than not, things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Either way, in order to be a successful salesperson, you will need to learn how to roll with the punches and adapt on the fly while keeping your eye on your goals. 

Adapting to change can include things like changing your customer approach, changing how and where you interact with your customers, and even cross-selling to people outside of your regular market.

Whatever it takes to hit your goals and get to point B is what you’ll need to do if you want to become a successful salesperson this year and the years to come.

Strong Prospect Qualification Skills

Bad prospect qualifying can lead to time-wasting, missed opportunities, closing bad deals with the wrong customers, poor customer relations, and more lost deals in later stages. Not to mention a decrease in return buyers, thanks to poor relations being built from the onset.

You need to find yourself an ideal customer match.

Ask yourself questions like, How do their demographics match your ideal customer? How big is their company? What industries are they in? Where is my ideal customer located? What tools would they have used in the past? Do they already have an existing ecosystem?

This step also goes hand-in-hand with helping your customer. If you’re trying to sell your product to people who won’t benefit from your service, that’s when you’ll start to get the shady car salesman reputation.

Next, understand your customer’s needs and identify their decision-making process.

By learning more about their needs, their buying decisions and how much time it takes for a decision to be made, you’ll be able to easily identify and approach your ideal prospects with far less risk of them turning cold or disappearing.

Keep A Positive Attitude

This one is a little more difficult to practice. Sometimes the days feel like they never end, and you get hit with ‘no’ after ‘no.’

Sales can be incredibly difficult. And it’s very hard for anyone who doesn’t work in sales to understand the kind of difficulties salespeople can face on the job. 

Keeping a positive attitude is one of those things that takes a lot of mental fortitude and willpower to maintain. If you can keep your own spirits up, even when things aren’t looking that way, you’ll be a lot more ready and approachable when something finally does come through. 

Another benefit of keeping a positive attitude is that you’ll positively impact your coworkers and the people around you. This has a trickle-down effect that can improve entire company cultures.

Honesty and Integrity

This shouldn’t even be mentioned at this point, but we’re going to go ahead and do it anyway, because there are a lot of salespeople out there that still think sales is about hustling, forcing or lying to your customer just to make a sale.

Sales is about helping people more than anything else. It’s about looking for their needs that you can help fill. It’s about understanding your customers in order to offer them the right product or service for their budget, lifestyle, business, or whatever it might be. 

With that being said, honesty and integrity are critical parts of becoming a successful salesperson. Your customers learn they can trust you and work with you, without being sold things they don’t need or can’t afford.

Effective Questioning Skills

Asking the right questions is paramount to finding out your customer’s needs, their product fits, and everything else you need to know about them. If you can’t ask the right questions, your sales will feel flat, unhelpful, forced, and uninterested. 

Asking the right questions shows interest in your customer. It shows that you want to know more about them, what they need, what their fears and concerns are, and more. If you want to become a better salesperson and really stand out from the crowd, you will need to improve the kind of questions you ask your customers.

There is no “right” way to do this, but there are better directions to head in when you’re thinking about what kinds of questions you can ask your customers.

Instead of asking, “What is your budget”, you could try asking something like “How much money will the right solution save you?”. This gives both you and your customer a different perspective on the problem they’re facing. 

The key is to try thinking laterally and ask questions that look to solve deeper problems or rephrase them entirely.

Systems Over Improvisation

We mentioned earlier that successful salespeople have the ability to adapt and change their approach depending on the circumstances. With that being said, there are almost always certain core aspects of every successful salesperson’s approach that never change.

Sales analytics, lead management, lead procurement, conversion tracking, and much more all are performed better when you have a solid system in place to take care of most of the brunt work.

Improvisation has its place, but it shouldn’t be relied on. Learn when you can handle certain aspects of sales yourself and when it’s best to rely on the systems for greater accuracy and efficiency.

Some of our favorite sales systems are:

• • Wingmate
  • Salesforce CRM
  • Pipedrive
  • SalesCreatio
  • Clickpoint

Meticulous At Tracking Sales Metrics

Making sales is one thing; tracking them is quite another. 

While making the sale is obviously the focus of your sales efforts, tracking and monitoring your sales metrics will allow you to learn key insights into your sales habits, your closing rates, your overall success ratio, and more.

Having access to your sales metrics will also help you achieve your goals better since you’ll be able to clearly see how many sales you’ve made, how much further you need to go, and where you are slowing down or losing traction.

Keeping track of your progress and your metrics is critical when it comes to improving and reaching your goals.

Building Relationships 

When the customer has access to all the information about your product and all the reviews about your product, as well as all your competitors, you’ll be able to make a difference and be the one they buy from by taking the time to build a strong relationship with them.

This is part of sales that a lot of newer sales reps forget. They want sales to be all about selling and closing and prospecting, but they forget that repeat customers are the heart and soul of the business.

If you can build better relationships with your customers, they’re far more likely to keep buying from you. And when customers become return customers, you win all the benefits they bring with them. Fewer costs per sale, higher overall spending per customer, and a higher chance of word of mouth are just some of the benefits that come when you focus on building lasting, high-quality relationships with your customers.

Comfortable With Silence

Sales are exciting, and we get that. But there’s nothing worse than a sales rep who won’t stop talking. 

Successful sales reps are able to control their emotions, even under high-pressure sales and multi-million dollar deals. One of the secrets to controlling your emotions is being able to take a moment and be comfortable with the silence that follows.

When you can take time to think, time to answer, and time to speak, it shows your customers that you’re present and you care about what you’re going to tell them. It shows them that you’re more interested in giving them a proper answer than you are in forcing the sale.

Take your time and give yourself a moment to answer.