11 Skills Every Sales Development Rep Needs to Master in 2023

Every sales reps is taught how to speak to prospects, but few are trained on the importance of listening. Unfortunately the average rep spends 65-75% of every sales call speaking. The more time a sales rep spends listening, the better he understands the prospect’s specific pain points and current situation. Additionally,  AI-Driven Sales Forecasting eliminates time that is often spent reporting, leaving more time for building relationships. Now that we’ve established the mindset successful salespeople have, let’s take a look at some of the most essential hard and soft skills they need.

However, allowing those feelings to prevent you from picking up the phone for the rest of the day will negatively impact your next 15 calls. Ideally, SDRs want to speak with a prospect on the phone, but sometimes a voicemail is the next-best https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/sales-representative/ option. Practice your video skills by creating short, engaging clips to interview yourself, deliver value with a quick tip, and ask to schedule a call. Review the video and take note of your delivery and how it might come across to a viewer.

Skills You Need to Excel at Virtual Selling (+ Tips)

In HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, 75% of companies said closing more deals is their top priority. Let’s explore the essential sales skills a salesperson must have to succeed in their role today. In addition to asking questions in your role, it’s also important to ask your prospect the right questions. Only then can you truly begin to find a solution and understand how your product or service can solve their problem. Sales training and professional development opportunities can keep your skills fresh. Being a lifelong learner gives you a competitive advantage in the game of sales.

The key for reps is to make sure you are spending your time wisely. Research shows that reps spend nearly two-thirds (64.8%) of their time in non revenue-generating activities, leaving only 35.2% for functions related to selling. At the start of the relationship, reps should evaluate roles and ensure they have decision-makers on board. It’s not enough to have a person identified, they must be participating in the process. If you’re not resilient, you quickly crumble under pressure and affect your team’s morale.

Demonstrating Potential Return on Investment

When a sales call doesn’t go the way you thought it would or you get a question or objection you aren’t sure how to respond to, ask your manager or peers for advice. It’s important to ask questions, so you can quickly solve those problems when they come up again. Wouldn’t it be great if your prospects immediately signed your contracts agreeing to all payment terms? You’re probably thinking “yes, that would be great.” However, that’s not always how deals work. Even after vetting prospects and laying out a thoughtful quote, many deals still end up in a negotiation phase before the dotted line is signed.

Active listening in sales requires focus as well as occasional/follow-up queries. These allow you not only to glean complete and clear information from your clients but also to build rapport and demonstrate that you genuinely care about their concerns. Selling not only requires showing the features of your product but also convincing customers that these features will solve their problems or will benefit them in some significant way. In most cases, you need to articulate your message by telling a story that deeply resonates with your target audience. A lack of baseline communication skills is a glaring red flag for anyone planning to enter the world of sales. We compiled a full list of 30+ sales skills you need to master to become a top performer who generates consistent revenue and vault yourself to the top of the totem pole in the sales field.

Sales Development Representative Skills That Really Matter

Because these can occur at any time, sales professionals need to learn and practice how to proactively handle objections and manage conflicts. High-performing salespeople have been known to use these incidents as a platform for converting new leads or an avenue for demonstrating a workplace solution to management. Inadequate product knowledge is unacceptable in the world of selling. Deep and extensive product knowledge is a prerequisite to high sales performance. In addition, demonstrating that you are a subject matter expert generates trust among your customers.

You can use several software options for video prospecting, including Loom and Soapbox by Wistia. Video prospecting has gained popularity over the last few years, and it’s popular for good reason. Simply put, video prospecting is customized outreach in a short, two-minute max video format. Unlike a phone call or an email, the prospect can connect with you on a more personal level without the time commitment of scheduling a Zoom call. A Sales Representative is a professional who initializes and manages relationships with customers. They serve as their point of contact and lead from initial outreach through the making of the final purchase by them or someone in their household.

How to highlight sales representative skills

Nurture and grow your business with customer relationship management software. Selling skills exercises include a variety of games, activities, and training methods that can help reps bolster the stronger elements of their sales acumen and develop the ones that need some work. You can’t anticipate or handle objections if you don’t know the issues prospects consistently raise about your product or service’s functionality. You can’t structure an effective value proposition if you don’t know what kind of value your product or service can offer. You can’t differentiate yourself from your competitors if you don’t know the features your offering has that theirs don’t.

• When interviewing for a position as a Sales Representative, be sure to highlight your skills in customer service, communication, and sales.
• This is how you can ensure your prospecting will also be at the best that it can be with such SDRs on your sales team.
• These sellers have well-developed empathy that enables them to understand where clients are coming from and determine their pain points.
• It’s a craft that can be honed and refined over time, and should amount to a repeatable, scalable process.
• You’re sharing the benefits a product or service brings and explaining why anyone listening should choose your offering over others.
• Base salaries can also differ by the size of the company, industry, experience, and other factors.

While selling involves money, something a lot more precious gets exchanged and utilized along the way — time. A salesperson’s ability to optimize time improves productivity and cost efficiency, creating the environment needed for high performance. This soft skill coupled with software automation, analytics and other technologies delivers significant ROI for any business. The eight most common skills for sales representatives in 2023 based on resume usage. After you find the sales representative skills you need, you can them to your resume using an AI resume builder. Product knowledge is a pretty standard part of the sales representative job description, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.

It is absolutely imperative that you know your product inside and out. Even the best-fit deal has the potential to be crushed by a rep who fumbles around the features and benefits. This is a very important skill in prospecting, but not many SDRs can do this well.

Work with your manager or ask them if they can provide the names of successful salespeople at your company to mentor you. You can ask your mentor for advice on sales strategies, ask them to roleplay with you, or even have them shadow a sales call for direct feedback. This relationship will help improve several sales skills and provide you an opportunity for feedback. If you think social media can only be leveraged by the marketing department, think again.