Best Salespeople

Selling products or services has never been easy.  For every successful salesperson there are ten unsuccessful ones.

So what makes one salesperson better than the other?

Well you can point to a host of things such as their product knowledge, their understanding of the value their product or service provides, their follow-up and persistence, knowledge of competitive products and your comfort factor in buying from them.

Others point to the use of automated sales tools such as CRM software and crm best practices that enable salespeople to more efficiently manage the sales cycle, keep notes and history for each sales opportunity and ensure that customer inquiries are followed up quickly and efficiently.  While all of these are excellent points there is one thing that you cannot teach or automate with sales management software and that’s passion.

Top Characteristics of Successful Salespeople

How many times have you received a call from a salesperson who sounds like they would rather be doing anything else but calling you to pitch their product?  Good salespeople sell with passion. You can hear it in their voice and see it in their mannerism if they are in front of you.  They not only believe whole heartedly in their product, but become disappointed if at the end of their presentation you don’t feel the same way.  To them it’s a personal failure.  These are the type of people that become successful in sales.

These are the people who believe making a sale is more important than the commission they will receive. These are the people you want on your team.  I cannot tell you where to find them, but only what to look for when interviewing them and that’s passion.

Image “Energetic Crepe Guy – Boulevard de Clichy – Montmartre, Paris” by Chris Goldberg on Flickr under Creative Commons license.