10 Important Traits that Successful Sales Professionals Share.

What Are the 20% at the Top Doing That You're Not Doing?

If you plan to succeed at selling, it's important that you emulate the traits of sales professionals who are getting it done. In other words, you want to do what the best of the best are doing.

Excellent sales skills are vital to sales success, whether you're a door-to-door salesman, B2B sales, selling cars at a dealership, or selling new homes.

It shouldn't surprise you that the customer wants to work with the best; The sales professional with the greatest set of sales SKILLS. They want to work with people who are great at their job.

So, here's a list of some of the most important traits and skills that the top 20% sales professionals share.

Confidence

Sales confidence is the ability to walk into a room and sell your product to anyone in the room. We've all met people with this kind of confidence, the person who speaks with so much passion and conviction; they turn everyone around them into believers.

Learning how to sell with confidence doesn't mean that you feel 100% confident all the time — no one does. Instead, selling with confidence means immediately putting the customer at ease by talking to them with conviction and sincerity.

It's about speaking from your purpose in every sales conversation and harnessing the "law of attraction" to create the kind of positivity and confidence that draws people to you instead of you chasing them down.

Confidence gives you a strong belief in yourself, your product, and how you change people's lives.

Resilience

Resilience is the ability to pick yourself up and brush yourself off after getting knocked down, after failure. It's refusing to personalize rejection and learning from your mistakes instead of repeating them.

The best sales reps have a way of using rejection to power their internal drive to be better sales pros. A resilient attitude "has an enormous amount to do with knowing what you want to accomplish and being dedicated to getting there.

"Great salespeople don't distance themselves from rejection,"

Instead, they receive it, learn from it, and turn it into an opportunity to do it again if necessary to reach the desired outcome.

They know they can't go back and physically change failure, but they're excited about the opportunity to do it again because they know what they'd do differently. And that kind of resilience is part of what makes top salespeople unique.

Listening

The ability to stop and genuinely hear people's perspectives while putting your agenda on hold long enough to understand what's being said takes a great deal of self-awareness and practice.

Too often, salespeople only listen to hear what they want to hear. Or they listen only long enough to get the information they need to support their next statement or agenda, not to understand what the customer is trying to tell them.

Listen with the intent to understand. As a seller, this means you're genuinely trying to understand the customer's situation and needs.

Focus on active listening. The word "active" means you are focused on them; you don't interrupt the client, check your email or do anything else.

Asking better questions lets you clear a path to a deeper understanding of what they want and what problem they're trying to solve, and it takes the conversation to a deeper, more thoughtful level.

Summarize what they said. It's one thing to be able to repeat what the customer said. But it's a whole new listening level when you can reflect back to the customer what they meant and how they felt about what they told you. It genuinely makes them feel heard and understood.

Insight

Customers no longer want to be pressured into purchasing. In years past, you could get away with more aggressive tactics, but today's customers want to feel that you know and understand their needs before you attempt to sell them anything.

This knowledge-based approach to sales is a far more rewarding experience for you and the customer.

This is what is known as insight selling. In the context of sales, an insight is a piece of relevant and compelling information, trend, data, expertise, or experience that, when shared, helps a potential customer overcome an objection or problem.

Today's consumers have the Internet at their fingertips, but that doesn't mean they want to make their decisions alone. Online information does not necessarily translate into confidence for the consumers, and they still need someone to help them think through their choices and decisions aloud.

With that in mind, sales professionals need to have expert knowledge of their customer's issues and challenges.

Instead of listing all your product specs, you need to offer tangible insight on how your product will resolve their problem. You want to be an empathetic and trustworthy advisor, which builds customer trust and loyalty.

Persistence.

Persistence is one of the more underappreciated attributes when it comes to sales. Too many people suffer from "recency bias." Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historical ones. In other words, you believe that a newer lead is better than an older lead.

Persistence is a "firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action despite difficulty or opposition." Sales is constantly filled with difficulty, opposition, and rejection.

Instead of persisting, most salespeople search for what's easy. Successful character traits and attributes don't change over time. Persistence, or determination, is an attribute that successful people have shared throughout history.

The ability to relentlessly pursue a goal even when it is difficult or takes more time and energy is a critical component of success. This is especially true in sales, where clients judge the seriousness of your attempt by your persistence over time and were giving up early is proof positive that you're not committed to your goal.

Honesty.

The sooner you realize that you don't have to rely on white lies, exaggerations, or half-truths to make a sale, the sooner you'll become a more confident salesperson. Honesty boosts self-esteem, making you a more assertive salesperson.

Never be afraid that you'll scare off a potential buyer with the truth. The mark of a strong salesperson is both quantity and quality of sales. Focus on being 100% honest, transparent, and authentic. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it's one of those simple sales strategies that can put you on the fast track to achieving your career goals.

Honesty is about having solid ethics, like refusing to negative sell your competition. I coach my people to highlight the value of what WE do instead of trashing the competition. No one likes a salesperson who talks negatively about their competitors? No One!

Honesty, more than anything, builds trust with the customer. When a buyer knows you've got nothing to hide, you'll make more sales.

Focused.

IPads, computers, and smartphones surround us in today's world. It's hard to keep your attention to the task at hand. The solution is to understand how your brain works. Thinking that you can be disciplined enough to ignore all the distractions around you is fruitless and leads to failure.

You have to create habits that make focused behavior automatic, like eliminating all the distractions. Don't work with your smartphone within arm's length; get away from it as far as possible.

And if you have to use a computer, make sure you can't get on social media, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok.

The point here is to stop trying to fight your brain. Instead, work with it, and work around it. Remove the distractions; you'll thank yourself later.

Optimistic

Optimism allows you to keep believing you're going to win; it enables you to believe that you can make a difference and underpins your belief that the next call will be the call that moves the chains.

It allows you to think that eventually, something will change for the customer and that change will result in your gaining a new opportunity to make a sale. It lets you believe that you can transform your customer's thinking with enough value.

Optimism allows you to use your available resources to overcome obstacles and roadblocks instead of quitting.

A salesperson has to be optimistic, and they have to believe they can win against even the longest of odds. Salespeople have to think that things will work out in their favor.

This optimistic belief allows a salesperson to follow up relentlessly because they believe that it will be a sale at some point, as opposed to pessimistic salespeople who refuse to follow up with anyone who doesn't act like they're buying today.

Enthusiastic

When you're enthusiastic about yourself and your business, everything improves for the better.

Enthusiasm builds confidence, and confidence is essential if you want people to buy from you. Enthusiasm builds self-confidence, as it changes your internal dialogue from negative to positive.

Enthusiasm gives you energy, which is essential if you want the drive to succeed. It's impossible to feel inspired and be energetic unless you're enthusiastic.

Your enthusiasm will make others feel positive and inspire them to believe in you and themselves.

Everything improves when you consciously decide to live and work with enthusiasm. Your energy, drive, and determination will soar, and you will become a magnet for the very things you need the most.

And it all begins with the commitment to live and work with enthusiasm.

Caring

We all want to be cared for, and feeling valued is just human nature. Being a more caring person is a tall order. Among the traits, this one sits at the top as far as importance and is one of the most difficult to nurture.

It takes an intentional and conscious effort to show people you care. Maybe you think you are a caring person — but do your actions show it?

Can the people around you tell you care about people by how you treat them daily?

Here are some things to get in the habit of regularly doing if you want to become a more caring person.

• Caring people are polite, considerate, generous, affectionate, patient, understanding, loving, and forgiving.
• They go out of their way to make others feel special, happy, and confident.
• They're sensitive to others' feelings.
• They care what others have to say.
• They listen rather than talk.
• They're quick to forgive.
• They voluntarily serve others, even when they don't have the time.
• A caring person provides small acts of kindness without expecting anything in return.

I like what Karin Hurt, founder of Let's Grow Leaders, said, Your customers want you to … understand their challenges, dreams, and goals, and have carefully considered why your solution makes sense — and they want to be sure you have their best interests at heart. They have to be sure you care more about their mission than your numbers."

Conclusion

No matter what type of personality you have or how much experience you have, following these best practices and having these excellent sales skills in your sales toolbox will help you win.

The success of a salesperson is ultimately measured by one thing — RESULTS!

It's more than their mannerisms, attitude, or the way you talk — it's a combination of different traits that work together to produce outstanding results!