Why Great Sales Skills Aren’t Enough.
By Stuart Ayling, Founder of the Business Development Studio

Selling is an essential skill in business. But even the most highly skilled salesperson is not guaranteed to get fantastic sales results.

That’s because there is more to being successful in sales than just having great sales skills.

Your recipe for sales success has three critical ingredients.

Ingredient #1 Sales Skills

I teach conversational-selling skills to people from a wide variety of industries. And I’ve seen training delegates quickly pick up new skills and realise they actually can sell. It’s not as difficult as they first thought – and it doesn’t feel sleazy or high-pressure. They leave the training workshops confident, re-energised, and ready to use what they have learned.

However… having the skills is just one ingredient.

What are the other two ‘secret’ ingredients?

They’re not often talked about. That’s because many people don’t understand them. And they usually mean more work has to be done.

So it’s tempting to gloss over these ingredients and just hope for the best.

That’s like thinking you can catch fish just by buying a fishing rod. (Of course you also need bait and a place to fish.)

Ingredient #2 Your Sales Process

Do you have a sales process for your company? Do you understand why it is important? Your Sales Process is the series of specific steps you go through to achieve a successful sales outcome – from the first point of contact through to successfully gaining commitment from your new client.

It’s important to understand that a sales process can, and will, vary from business to businesses. Even within the same industry.

To develop your Sales Process you need to look at the crossover point from your marketing activities to your selling activities. There is a big difference between marketing and selling, and you must know where one stops and the other starts.

Remember my maxim: Marketing Creates Leads… Sales Creates Clients.

Ingredient #3 Your Business Development Plan

In addition to having the personal skills, and having a systematised sales process, you also need to have a proactive Business Development Plan. This plan will guide the choice of sales strategies you select to build your sales territory, or the overall business.

For some companies the business development plan will be quite detailed. It will need to manage multiple communication channels across various personnel within the client organisation.

For complex situations you may have an advances spreadsheet showing each client, contacts, types of business opportunities within that client organisation, likelihood of success, resources needed to develop the opportunity etc.

In other company’s the business development plan may be based more on geographical factors, requiring the sales person to expand their territory, or to achieve greater market share.

For these situations the plan may simply be a list of clients and prospects, with and indication of sales call frequency and potential sales value for each.

Either way the outcome is to have a plan for how you will target various sales opportunities. You need to know where to spend your time. You need to have a focus for where you’ll have most chace of getting new business.

You see, having great sales skills is only part of the recipe.

To be truly successful in building sales for your business you will always need to have effective sales skills, understand how to manage each sale (using a specific sales process), and also have a forward-looking business development plan (to prioritise your sales activities).

Whether you are managing a sales team or running your own business, the recipe won’t change. You need all three ingredients to be successful.