Sales: more joy than pain

Is sales still Sales? New-ish skills to make the game more enjoyable in 2024.

December always brings with its arrival a time of reflection and reckoning. What did we do well? What could we have done better? And I think particularly this year, my teams and I see massive amounts of opportunity arising from the last few months (even years) of transformation. If you look at how AI and ChatGPT have forced a rethinking of how we can do sales pitches, reconsidering how we word our presentations and brochures, and accessing more global markets quicker thanks to increasingly responsive and accurate translation tools. Add to that our means of communication, the advent of social selling where big data is allowing us to connect with candidates better and more easily while being more responsive to client needs. So much is changing and it’s happening fast. So, is there a way to keep the joy in the sales game as we begin 2024? I believe there is.

People have always mattered and will continue to matter

Sales teams will need to further refine how they interact with and respond to the people around them: be it the customer for whom they are designing a solution or making a proposal or their teams they need to motivate to be more responsive, creative, innovative, etc. That’s why I believe that increasingly we will have to refine our skills for engaging clients and making them feel valued. This means that, in quite a few cases, the hard sell tactic won’t work that well anymore. Especially, as generations change, good sales teams will consist of persons who have high levels of authenticity and are in the sales business because they love it. They don’t mind that extra 20 minutes of checking in on how someone is mentally/emotionally; they are happy to ask about family and friends; they can sense when their counterpart is having an off day or a boss is putting pressure on fast decision-making or revising budgets. Your people-focused sales rep will SEE, REACT, and ADAPT.

Listening is the new superpower

Empathic people skills will make members of our sales teams stand out. There is too much noise in our world today. People talk endlessly in meetings. They have news running constantly. Sometimes they speak over one another. And this leaves many of us in a space where we do not feel HEARD, or perhaps even SEEN. This fact opens up a whole new space for talented sales people who take time to listen and to hear: persons who validate feelings and concerns as they help clients to find recruitment or staffing solutions that address a number of issues impacting markets today – migration, digital and tech transformation including AI, market volatility and instable supply chains, etc. A proactive, responsive listener can be priceless for your salesforce because the ability to listen and actually hear is worth its weight in gold. Clients are more likely to close a sale when they feel their positions are validated and understood. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there in today’s job market. Make sure you use a good ear to understand how it impacts individuals and their feelings or reactions. This will help build stronger long-term client relationships.

Sales = Learning, so let’s make learning fun

As in other parts of life, the rule holds (even for sales teams) that we are all different and all have unique, specific skills that help us build and close a deal. Some members of the sales team intuit well; they have high EQ and SQ and understand pain points and how to adjust offers to what a client or candidate is looking for. Others may take a more educational approach and win over a client with their knowledge of how a business operates and by leveraging data to imagine scenarios that a client might not even know they will ultimately face. That’s why a top task will be to make our sales training and skills development programmes more agile and tailored to the skills and talents that make our team members stars. Also, with training we need to count on the reality that nothing in the recruitment and staffing markets is static and learning will be a constant process. I believe we will need to invest more time in coming years into microlearning and also micro-credentials. This means closely monitoring markets, analysing data to keep ahead of trends and also equipping our sales teams with soft skills that make them stand out during client interactions. Psychologically, both as workers and humans, we’ve had a crazy past three years. Let’s skill our sales teams to acknowledge these common ups and downs win over and keep clients by taking a human approach to sales.

Change is only going to get more fast-paced and crazier. This wild ride will be all the better if we let our clients and candidates know that we’re truly their partners and we’ll get through the journey together.