Key skills to target in your future sales recruits

Successful salespeople demonstrate an impressive range of soft and hard skills. If you’re looking for your next rising star, consider the common skills exhibited by talented salespeople below, and identify which ones are most important to your specific role, team, company, and industry. Develop a must-have and a nice-to-have list and, from there, craft your job description.

1. Strong communication skills are essential as salespeople need to be able to pitch their products and services effectively both verbally and on paper.
2. Great listening skills are vital to unlocking a good understanding of the motivations, needs, pain points, buying behaviours, wants, and interests of customers and prospects. Such understanding delivers empathy which enables authentic, positive, trust-driven relationships to flourish.
3. Time management is also key. There are many moving parts to the sales role. Sales professionals need to be able to manage their time efficiently to meet expectations and deadlines.
4. Problem-solving is equally important. Salespeople come across stumbling blocks which they need to overcome every day. Sometimes the solution will be obvious and easy. At others, they’ll need to be creative to meet the challenge.
5. Perseverance is crucial. There’s a lot of cold calling that may lead only to customers’ voicemails. Sales representatives need to have the determination and resilience to keep going even when it seems they’re getting nowhere.
6. An in-depth, up-to-the-minute knowledge of the features and benefits of the products and services that they’re promoting is essential. Salespeople need to demonstrate expertise and enthusiasm at every customer touchpoint. A firm grasp of competitors’ businesses, products, and services – as well as industry trends – is also important.
7. A strong team spirit is highly desirable. Salespeople often need to work together to achieve their collective goals and to keep each other motivated, engaged, and on track.
8. Flexibility is another important element in the sales toolkit. The value of being able to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, business objectives, and customer demands shouldn’t be underestimated.

For further reading on the topic, Salesflare has written a great blog article here.

So what’s next? As the UK’s number one multilingual recruitment consultancy, we invite you to get in touch to explore the cost, time, and outcome benefits of partnering with us to fill your open vacancies. From expertly crafting job descriptions that will be seen by and attract the right people, to sending you a shortlist of pre-vetted, great-fit candidates – and beyond – we make finding your future rising stars easy and stress-free. Please contact us at info@ablrecruitment.com or 020 7092 3911 to get started!