subject: Top Business Skills - Sales Skills [print this page] When it comes to top business skills, having sales skills is incredibly important. In fact, the ability to sell at the top levels will be more interesting to a business employer than your technical or leadership skills. Unless you are one of those people who has the natural ability to sell products well, you will need to have a knowledge of marketing and selling actions and their results. You will want to especially know the results of your own marketing and selling actions so you will know your strong and weak points.
Tracking your own sales skills will be very important in the business world. You will want to know your position in several important selling positions. You will want to know what the leads in your marketing funnel and your follow ups on those leads. You will also want to track the amount or orders in your sales funnel and know the position of your proposals and statements of work.
Also, keeping track of the orders delivered, follow ups on each completed sale and referrals. Next, you will want to know in detail all of your sales numbers. Any numbers that are related to your sales skills need to be tracked. You will want to keep track of numbers such as your average dollar value on each sale, your sale to earn ratio and your sales cycle times.
When working on your sales skills, you will want to continuously increase the amount of actions you take every business day, if possible. Increasing the work you do to sale will only increase the amount of sales you can possibly have during a day. Make more calls per day, more appointments during your week and more presentations if possible.
An important sales skill is to touch base with your customers at least every sixty days. This will aid in creating customer loyalty, which is always great for your selling abilities. Active customers should always be contacted within this time period, but some sellers overlook the inactive customers. There is no harm in checking with all of your previous customers. To further improve your sales skills with customers, you will want to listen more than you speak in most cases. Most people are not interested in hearing a non-stop sales pitch and appreciate the chance to talk and ask questions.
