What are soft skills?

Soft skills are invaluable to the sales workplace and are often also know as the 'core' skills. These skills include communication and empathy and are relevant to most professions. Below are the seven top soft skills that will help sales representatives looking to hit quota and generate revenue.

1. Empathy

Empathy is crucial to build trust among your customers, you must prioritise your clients goals and emotions over your own to ensure their needs are met as according to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report only 40% of buyers believe that salespeople are trustworthy. Additionally, empathy helps sales representatives to root deeper into leads' problem to find the core issue and create an effective solution. This ultimately will enhance the customers experience through providing relevant product or service recommendations to fit the clients needs resulting in greater customer satisfaction. By providing a personalised experience you can avoid rejections and overcome sales objections.

To develop empathy:

- Focus on how you pay attention to ensure you are actively listening.

- Be curious by asking questions and listening intently.

2. Persuasion

Persuasion is a valuable soft skill in sales as it can provide gentle reassurance to nurture prospects towards a confident purchase decision. For example, directing the lead to a relevant source (case study) so they can see the tangible benefits of a product in a real life scenario. Persuasion skills are useful at all stages of the sales cycle. This skill will help you to overcome early objections and help you to reassure customers that you understand their needs and can solve their problems.

To develop persuasion:

- Put yourself in your prospects scenario by considering what could be stopping them from progressing.

- Ask questions.

3. Adaptability

It is important to remember that circumstances change therefore you must always be ready to adapt your sales approach. To be an adaptable salesperson you must have the knowledge on your industry, business and target audience to reassure leads when something does not go to plan.

To develop adaptability:

- Get out of your comfort zone.

- Shadow a sales engineer or product manager as they have unique technical knowledge making them good to shadow.

4. Organisation

The increase in people working from home has led to further independence therefore making organisation in the workplace crucial. Sales reps often have multiple responsibilities from managing leads and hosting meetings to reporting, travelling and training. An organised salesperson knows which prospects need attention and take the time to check in and follow up where necessary. Implementing a CRM system makes staying organised easier by helping you know when exactly to follow up with a contact.

To develop organisation:

- Record and time your regular activities as you will begin to understand where your time goes and learn how to use it more effectively.

- Allow technology such as CRM softwares to help you by automating workflows and repetitive tasks.

5. Resilience

In sales, it is important to stay resilient as you can be doing everything right and find that you still can’t close a deal due to forces outside of your control. Resilient sales reps and managers take steps to mitigate poor performance. It is crucial to have support from your management to create supportive environments to address sales related struggles and rebuild confidence with each small success. Managers can also get a clearer view of their sales team’s processes using a visual CRM pipeline and may spot patterns that are easy to correct.

To develop resilience:

- Recognise the positives of failure so they become learning opportunities.

- Take notice of other reps' struggles to help you to accept that sales can be difficult and not everything is in your control.

- Stay optimistic as this is one of the must-have qualities top sales representatives possess. 

6. Communication

As a sales rep you are responsible for turning prospects into customers. Effective communication is critical to sales success as it allows you to build the product and customer knowledge you need to reassure leads and sell confidently. Therefore, it is important to understand customers pain points and solve them by recommending suitable products.

Listening skills, clarity and tone are three areas of communication to focus on as a salesperson.

To develop communication skills:

- Vary your communication channels.

- Shadow top-performing reps and learn from their interactions with prospects how to use tone and language to make buyers feel comfortable and confident.

7. Storytelling

Great storytelling works in sales as it does in marketing: by appealing to buyers’ emotional decision-making process. Salespeople can use great stories to trigger emotional responses that make prospects believe more in products and, therefore, more likely to buy.

For example, a B2B sales pitch story could use the following structure:

- Status quo. “This is how your business is operating right now.”

- Conflict. “All of those manual admin tasks are pulling your team away from your customers and hindering their experience of your business.”

- Resolution. “Our automation software will take care of those menial tasks, so your team can focus their attention on personalised customer service.”

- Outcome. “With more attention from your team, customer sentiment improves and repeat business increases.”

To develop storytelling skills:

- Read and look for the narrative structure in the media you consume, from news articles to fiction, to understand how your audience feels at certain stages of your presentation and effectively tap into their emotions.

- Take inspiration from marketers by looking for the stories they tell in their content.