The 3 Stages of Your Selling Skills Development

Most Salespeople Stop at Stage 1 or Fall Victim to 3.5

In previous articles, we covered the journey segments of a sales career.  In a four-part series, I went through the life and times of the early years, all the way to the later years of a sales career.  See: The Life & Times of an Ag Sales Professional – the Early Years

Today, we cover the selling skills development stages.  These are how you learn to sell, learn to manage a territory, learn to become a positive brand to your customers and ultimately remain top of mind as the go-to salesperson in your market.

          Stage 1:  The Hard Skills

This is the beginning, the bread and butter, the basic training course on sales.  In this stage you learn how to connect with customers, ask questions, present on your products, and ask for the sale.  Most of us have been to one or several of these courses.  They are engaging for the new salesperson as they find out that there is an actual process to selling which they can go through to help them sell.

The majority of this development stage is designed around what to do when you get in front of a customer.  In the last 30 years, I have been through about a dozen of these programs and facilitated hundreds of them.  While engaging for a newcomer, they can seem repetitive to an experienced salesperson.  However, they are a great refresher each time you go through them and hear new ways to understand the basics.

Often, salespeople think they will attend a course like this and learn something revolutionary which no one else out there knows.  The trouble is that the selling steps are a fairly old concept and they all are based on the same or similar steps.  This stage is really the ante to get into the selling game.  I’d like for you to look at it as I described it: boot camp, your Bachelor’s Degree, or Stage 1 in your development.  Want to be better than the average salesperson?  Great, move on to the intermediary Stage 1.5!

          Stage 1.5:  Time & Territory Management

The #1 and #2 salesperson killer are disorganization and calling on the wrong accounts.  Both of these are fundamentals of time and territory management. The problem is that few sales training course ever discuss these topics.  As a salesperson, we are left to figure it out on our own.  Or, the assumption is that we will interrupt our very busy sales manager and ask her, “What should I do next?  Who should I call on today?”  That’s just not going to happen.

We office from home, even more now since the pandemic.  So, we wake up, take a guess as to who we should go see, and turn right out of the driveway for the day.  Or, we go see the accounts we haven’t been to in a while, or the account that has been complaining recently (the squeaky wheel).

For further reading on this, see:

• Salesperson Killer #1
• Salesperson Killer #2

          Stage 2:  The Soft Skills – The Essential Selling Skills

Now we are getting to the best part of selling and developing yourself in your role.  The essential selling skills are often mis-labeled as “soft skills”; as if they are easy.  The soft really means they don’t have hard and fast measurements.  However, they are the most important for long term success in your agribusiness territory.  These skills separate the salesperson from the day-to-day, weekly or the monthly selling process to that of a trusted advisor.

The salesperson who goes out, does their job of asking questions, presenting on their products and then closing on a sale will have success.  However, they will also get price shopped and will fight feature/benefit comparisons constantly.  By applying the essential selling skills, you can begin the transformation from vendor to trusted advisor.  While this doesn’t remove all price resistance, nor combat all objections, it does tip the scales in your favor.  How much?  That’s a great question and one that I spend a lot of time discovering with salespeople in workshops and coaching discussions.  As always, it depends on:  how much you can differentiate and how much value (dollars, time, or emotional impact) you bring to your customers.

What are some of the essential skills?

• Communication
• Empathy
• Teamwork
• Interpersonal Skills
• Work Ethic
• Problem Solving
• Flexibility
• Continuous improvement
• Leadership

As you can see, they are tough to measure and tough to determine how important any one is over the other.  However, they are learnable and they develop over a lifetime career in sales.  You can also see that no matter how good your closing question might be (hard skill), if you lack some of these essential skills, you are not going to sell a customer for long.

          Stage 3:  The Brand of YOU

In a recent training session, one salesperson stated that if the prospect doesn’t buy from him on the first call, he moves on and does not return.  At first, I had a lot of doubts on this.  After some discussion, it turns out this salesperson has been selling in this market for over 20 years.  The customers he works with have some of the highest production yields on their herd.  This salesperson’s local brand image is so high that he only works with big herds who know him.  He has filled his territory and only takes on a few new customers.  So, if you are a prospect and want to work with him, you need to decide quickly.  This is an example of the highest form of a personal brand.  I’m sure it didn’t happen overnight and this salesperson goes above and beyond for his customers.  The reward comes in the form of excellent referrals and customer’s who value every chance to work with him.

Two important concepts to remember:

• You do have a personal brand. Yes, you have a company brand and maybe a manufacturer’s brand.  And, you also have a personal brand to your customers.  I describe it as, “what it’s like to do business with you”.  Your customers form this brand of you in their mind over the years as they work with you.  Let me share a few personal brand images of a salesperson: helpful, too talkative, only see him when there’s a sale, stops by with no real purpose, driven to do what’s best for me, well connected in the industry, she’s my go-to person when something goes wrong, talks and talks but never delivers on the talk, old school but we have done business with him for so long….

• It’s important to keep in mind that your customer owns the brand of you. You can and should do a lot of positive steps to develop your brand.  However, at the end of the day, that image in the customer’s mind when they think of you is determined by that customer.  Their perception is their reality.

In many cases, this is the most important brand for you to develop.  In the early years of selling, we rely on our company or manufacturer’s brand recognition.  As we work in the industry, we make small additions of positive and small deductions of negatives to our personal brand.  The net effect is what it’s like to do business with us.

          Stage 3.5:  Complacency

One final thought to keep in mind.  A brand doesn’t live forever.  It can be altered for good or bad in an instant.  We’ve all seen celebrities who go down in flames from one wrong comment, action or indiscretion.  In sales, complacency can be one area that trips us up as we develop and have success.  Confidence is great, but over-confidence as we gain success can turn a positive brand to negative.

There’s a poem titled “Success leads to Failure” that can help us.

Success leads to Confidence,

Confidence leads to Arrogance,

Arrogance leads to Complacency,

Complacency leads to Failure

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