subject: Habits Of Successful Salespeople [print this page] Successful salespeople usually have certain sales habits that lead to their consistent results. If you are motivated to improve your sales performance, you can incorporate some of these habits and likely see an improvement in your results.
1. Being more organized
The day in a life of a salesperson can be very hectic. This can be because there is a lot to do and things often move at a very fast pace. To help you to better deal with this, while remaining effective and efficient at the same time, you can focus on improving your ability to stay organized.
A couple of areas where being organized can help improve results are how organized you are with your time and your schedule, how organized you are with how you manage customer and prospect information, and how organized you are with how you manage pipeline information.
2. Getting in front of target prospects
Being successful in sales is dependent on a salesperson's ability to get in front of target prospects. There are many different ways to do this and the key to effectiveness in this area can vary for different sales positions.
But at the end of the day, successful salespeople find a way to make this happen and there are some things that you can do to improve your ability to do the same thing. Using tools like cold calling, professional networking, and use of social media are examples of areas where you can invest time and energy to improve results.
3. Build relationships
Most people would agree that prospects buy from salespeople that they like. As result, successful salespeople are able to be effective at building rapport and relationships with prospects.
You may lean toward thinking that you are who you are and prospects will either like you or they won't. But the reality is that there are some clear and practical things you can do to make prospects more comfortable around you and increase the level of rapport.
4. Qualify prospects
You can only work so many hours in a week. As result, you must get as much as you can out of each hour. And to do that, you will want to spend as much time as you can with high quality prospects, which are prospects that fit well with what you have to offer and have the ability to purchase.
Successful salespeople are effective at qualifying prospects so that they minimize the time wasted with prospects that have a low probability of purchasing. Asking good qualifying questions is the key to success in this area.
5. Manage sales cycles
You can either let the sales cycle control you or you can control the sales cycle. There are clear sales process stages that you should be moving deals through and there are clear things that you can do to manage this and be more effective at moving deals from one sales cycle stage to the next.
One thing you will want to focus on are identifying the different sales stages for your selling process, but also identify where the prospect is in their buying process and when they need to make the purchase buy. From there, there are things you can do to facilitate and manage forward movement.
