Intuitively figuring out the sequence of events that will lead to a closed sale is a unique skill that allows a salesperson to excel. Rather than become discouraged and downtrodden during a period of low sales numbers, they keep looking for new ways to innovate in their field and make those hard-to-close sales. A responsible person manages to get things done regardless of the obstacles that may arise.
These salespeople have a sense of urgency to solve problems, anticipating the possible outcomes before taking action. This no-excuses personality trait allows a person to remain positive and optimistic, accept constructive criticism and make adjustments to improve performance when necessary.
This trait is undoubtedly interwoven into many of the other characteristics of a good salesperson. Remaining constantly aware of one's impact on the client is essential in connecting with the client and closing the deal. Find jobs. Company reviews. Find salaries. Upload your resume. Sign in. Career Development. Key characteristics of a good salesperson. Putting yourself in someone's shoes is the bedrock of empathy, which enables both psychologists and sales people to succeed in their jobs.
Sales people know that the prospect's opinions are not always stated explicitly. Good sales people can make inferences and logical deductions, reading between the lines to understand the true meanings and desires of their prospects, and be able to elicit pain points strategically.
Likewise, a main goal of a psychologist is to understand the true feelings of their client based on the verbal and non-verbal cues that their client's display. Sales people need to be able to speak persuasively, effectively, and concisely. Sales people are required to read their prospect and know how to adjust their tone, diction, and speed to match the conversation flow of their client.
Psychologists deal with patients who are 50 and others who are 10 years old, and they must have good awareness and control over their speech.
When client's express frustration, anxiety or fear, it is critical that the sales person stays calm. The ability to stabilize and regulate one's outward emotions is key for maintaining a professional and effective sales process. A psychologist's ability to manage and succeed in a consultation with their client depends largely on their ability to extract feelings without showing frustration or sadness themselves.
With either profession, breaking character can lose the trust of the client. Patience is a core quality of sales people, who need to nurture leads and move deals forward over months at a time. Demanding a sale to early can ruin the deal. An employer would avoid much grief by finding this out in advance, before so much effort is spent in trying to hire, train, and spoon-feed a man who does not have within him the basic dynamics to be successful.
Since the selection of top salesmen is potentially of such enormous value, why, it might be asked, has there been so little success to date in developing methods to preselect effectively?
For at least 50 years, psychologists have been working very hard in the area of testing. Almost every aspect of human personality, behavior, attitude, and ability has at one time or another come under the scrutiny of the tester. There have been some notable successes in testing, most especially perhaps in the IQ and mechanical-ability areas.
Of late, personality testing, especially with the increasing use of projective techniques, has gained a certain level of sophistication. The area which has been to date most barren of real scientific success has been aptitude testing, where the aptitude consists of personality dynamics rather than simple mechanical abilities.
The ability to sell, an exceedingly human and totally nonmechanical aptitude, has resisted attempts to measure it effectively. The reasons for this failure up until now are many, but there appear to be four basic causes for sales aptitude test failure. Thus, tests have been developed through asking questions of successful salesmen or successful people in other fields, with the assumption that if an applicant expresses the same kind of interest pattern as an established salesman, he too will be a successful salesman.
This assumption is wrong on its face. Psychologically, interest does not equal aptitude. Even if someone is interested in exactly the same specific things as Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, this of course does not in any way indicate the possession of a similar baseball skill. Equally, the fact that an individual might have the same interest pattern as a successful salesman does not mean that he can sell.
Even if he wants to sell, it does not mean that he can sell. When an individual is applying for a job, he obviously will attempt to tell the potential employer whatever he thinks the employer wants to hear. There are manuals on the market on how to beat sales aptitude tests, but, even without such a manual, the average intelligent person can quickly see what is sought and then give the tester what the tester wants.
Thus, the tests may simply succeed in negatively screening those who are so unintelligent that they are unable to see the particular response pattern sought.
In other words, since they are too dull to fake, they may be screened out. The perceptive interviewer, however, is likely to notice this kind of stupidity even more quickly than the tests do, and he can probably do a better job of this negative screening than the average fakable test. Recent critics of psychological testing decry the testers who are seeking conformity and the standardized ways in which they judge applicants for sales and other occupations.
This criticism is all too valid. The creative thinker, the impulsive free spirit, the original, imaginative, hard-driving individual is often screened out by tests that demand rigid adherence to convention—an adherence, in fact, that borders on a passive acceptance of authority, a fear of anything that might in any way upset the applecart of bureaucratic order. Paradoxically, this fearful, cautious, authoritarian conformist, although he might make a good civil servant, or even a fair controller or paperwork administrative executive, would never make a successful salesman.
Many of these tests not only fail to select good salesmen, but they may actually screen out the really top producers because of their creativity, impulsiveness, or originality—characteristics that most tests downgrade as strangeness or weakness.
We discovered a situation of this type recently in working with a client: A company in the Southwest embarked on an intensive recruiting effort for salesmen. We began receiving the tests of a number of applicants.
These tests all appeared to follow a certain pattern. The men were not quite recommendable, and all for about the same reason—a definite lack of ego drive. For the most part, they had some empathy, and without exception they had good verbal ability, but none had the intense inner need for the sale that we look for in a productive salesman.
Many psychological tests screen out the really top producers because of their creativity, impulsiveness, or originality—characteristics that most tests downgrade as strangeness or weakness.
After about 20 such tests came through our office, we questioned the sales manager as to what criteria he was using for screening the men who took the test. We found that before he gave the applicants our test, he had them take the sales aptitude test that had been developed by his company some years before. Those men who scored high on that test were given our test.
Men with strong ego drive could not as a rule score near the top of that test. And so the very men with the quality we were seeking—strong ego drive—were actually screened out. We then asked the sales manager not to use that test but to screen only for credit reference and general appearance, and to give our test to those who passed this simple screening. Most personality and aptitude tests are totally traitological in their construction and approach.
The dynamic interaction that is personality, as viewed by most modern-day psychologists, is buried in a series of fractionalized, mathematically separable traits.
In our research we attempted to bypass traits and to go directly to the central dynamisms that we believed were basic to sales ability: empathy and ego drive. By seeking these deeper, more central, characteristics, we immediately reduced the possibility of faking, since the respondent would find it extremely difficult to determine what in fact was being sought.
Needless to say, the importance of interest as a variable has been reduced sharply, and the conformity factor has been completely subordinated to the basic central characteristics being measured. This use of central dynamics rather than traits, with its corollary implications, has produced what we believe to be a positive method of predicting sales success that is advanced beyond what has been done to date.
Many sales executives feel that the type of selling in their industry and even in their particular company is somehow completely special and unique. This is true to an extent. There is no question that a data-processing equipment salesman needs somewhat different training and background than does an automobile salesman.
What is not so easily seen, however, are the basic sales dynamics we have been discussing, which permit an individual to sell successfully, almost regardless of what he is selling. At work, they work. Their thoughts are with clients, schedules, and effective tools.
Good salesmen are always ready for a call, demo, or a meeting with a client. They possess the discipline to follow up, make that call or send that email. They keep working with a prospect once he becomes a client. They build a personal relationship with a client for him to become a loyal customer after. What else makes a person responsible is his ability to recognize his mistakes and not blame other people. If you keep asking me what makes a good salesman, my next answer will definitely include being smart active which means being effective.
They say that many closed deals are the most accurate indicator of salespeople being active at work. In this sense, activity is correlated with results. More e-mails mean more meetings, which lead to having more demos, which, in turn, bring more closed deals.
A smart thing to do is to invest more time in collecting information about your prospect. Another thing to pay attention to, good salespeople use techniques that work. Smart salesmen plan their day, week, a month ahead. They work effectively, remember?
Do you know what differentiates a top sales specialist from a regular one? They are non-stop learners, improvers and they constantly strive for growth. Good salespeople follow their favorite blogs, trends, recent news in sales and the world, read psychology , and learn how to automate tasks. They try to stay up to date on the news and be an all-around person. Well, you probably know that knowledge is power. The last but not least, all top sales have that one quality, which is a synonym for charming, engaging, alluring, magnetic.
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