There's hardly any organization that would not want its salespeople to be well-groomed and highly presentable.
Every employer understands well that in sales, the personalities of salespeople are vital in driving conversions. So, as someone looking to gain great success in sales, you need to work on your personality traits. But what are the best personality traits in sales that enhance the prospects of success?
In this blog, we find relevant answers to this vital question that has a direct correlation with your career advancement in sales. With the traits mentioned here, you can optimize your performance in terms of lead to customer conversion rate.
Key Personality Traits That Salespeople Should Have
1. Proficiency in Communication Skills
As someone with aspirations to achieve great success in sales, you have to constantly work on your communication skills.
The way you initiate a conversation with your leads has a great influence on deciding the course of that communication. In fact, this is where the first impression matters a lot because your communication proficiency is a tangible part of your personality.
As a salesperson, you need to bring greater modesty and sophistication into your communication skills. Your effectiveness as a communicator should be such that your leads are happy to listen to you with great interest. Also, you need to exhibit great courtesy in your strategic communication.
Going ahead, there's an interesting trend pertaining to sales follow-up cited by Hubspot that's crucial for you to know. It states that around 60% of customers deny making a purchase four times on average before agreeing. This implies that as a salesperson, you will need to engage in multiple follow-up conversations.
Having said that, you need the most impressive communication skills coupled with persuasive skills. If you are not impressive enough in terms of your communication skills as a personality trait, your leads will tend to disengage sooner or later. You ought to constantly build your communication skills and also bring great flexibility in your personality as a communicator.
When you have great flexibility in your communication styles, you can connect effectively with different kinds of leads who have different levels of communication efficiency.
Besides, in sales, you also need to lay a lot of emphasis on improving your active listening skills. You need to listen attentively to your lead first and then offer your product or service as a solution to exactly what they are looking for. Makes complete sense, doesn’t it?
2. Great Knowledge of the Product or Service
Having great knowledge of things and believing in that knowledge always pays off. We have talked about how significant it is for you to be a great communicator to drive purchasing actions in people. However, what needs to complement those conversations is extensive knowledge of the product or service you are offering.
To elaborate, no matter how well dressed you are or how fluent your language skills are, your potential customers will have a greater interest in your knowledge. They would want to learn about your company’s offerings and that is where they will be judging your product knowledge. In fact, you would be amazed to know that as per Wranx, salespeople with flawless product and brand expertise achieve 87%more sales than others. This very well explains why knowledge is the key to success in sales.
Even if you look at it in the general context, people with intellectual and knowledgeable personalities often have better chances of influencing others. When you speak volumes of knowledge on the market, product, and the company, people gravitate to your personality. Selling becomes much easier from there and you can go on to unlock many closed doors.
Having said that, you should always be willing to learn and add to your knowledge. Your brand will seem a lot more intellectual to people when you endorse great knowledge. Skills will always come later but knowledge has to be the launchpad.
3. Efficiency in Emotional Intelligence
Intelligence has always been one of the strongest personality traits among people. If you keep yourself in the shoes of a consumer for a minute, would you buy from a salesperson who does not seem intelligent enough?
The chances would always be on the lower side in that case. Besides, when the consumers are getting streak smart in the contemporary era, salespeople have to overpower customers’ intelligence to sell better.
However, in the modern world, the idea of intelligence is no longer limited to IQ. Emotional intelligence is the new dimension of intelligence that is being laid great emphasis on. In the field of sales, the relevance of EQ becomes even greater. Before we understand how EQ adds to success in sales, it is vital to look at the various dimensions of EQ. Emotional intelligence is a broad personality trait in itself that has the following components.
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Empathy
- Motivation
- Social Skills
Now, if you look at these components of EQ, each one of them is a strong and impressive quality that a person can have. A salesperson needs to display great self-awareness to be sure of their strengths and core competencies.
This self-awareness will reflect in the confidence with which they approach their leads. Moreover, intrinsic motivation will keep them going to make constant efforts be it in terms of first contact with potential customers or follow-up conversations. Salespersons should always have the charisma and spark of motivation in their personalities.
Furthermore, the fundamentals of sales have a lot of correlation with relationship building. Salespeople have the best chance of selling when they are able to cultivate a cordial and trusted relationship with their potential customers. This is where they ought to have effective social skills to be able to knit worthwhile relationships. Having said that, the better the relationships you are able to build with your potential customers the higher are chances of conversion.
Besides, the art of fostering cordial connections based on high trust also requires empathy as a personality trait. When you are empathetic towards your leads and make them believe that you understand their emotions, it will facilitate a better association.
Overall, when you have high EQ as a salesperson, you will be able to understand the emotions of your leads in a more effective way and steer them in a direction towards conversion. You will be able to manipulate the emotional attitudes and behaviors in a more successful way with high EQ. In sales, you have got to do that a lot many times when chances of conversion become bleak.
4. Balanced Inquisitiveness
To be a successful salesperson, you need to manifest great inquisitiveness and curiosity in the way you present yourself in front of your leads. You need to show great interest in understanding their requirements and dilemmas by asking questions. Needless to say, you need to be sensible enough to ask the right questions at the right time rather than overdoing the curiosity.
By showing great curiosity and asking the relevant questions, you get a perspective into the minds of the potential customers. Hence, you get to know what they are thinking or what their exact requirements are. Consequently, you can readjust your strategic approach to convert those leads.
5. Effective Situational Awareness
As mentioned above, emotional intelligence will add great value to your self-awareness. However, to succeed in sales, you need another vertical of awareness that is situational awareness. When you are in sales, situations will be more adverse than not. You will feel a lot many times that the situation is slipping out of your hands and the chances of conversion will seem bleak.
That is where you would need excellent situational awareness to win it back. You need to have a good understanding of the situation at hand and then determine the most appropriate response to it. The greater your sense of situational awareness the more successful you will be. In fact, for people in sales or even marketing, situational awareness is a pivotal trait. It helps you to have control of the dynamic nature of situations that seem to change abruptly.
Besides, situational awareness will also help you in understanding the ideal time for having a sales discussion with your leads. It is imperative to do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in sales and that is where a great awareness of the situation proves to be the key.
Moreover, as a salesperson, you need to be creative and innovative in a constant manner. Again, the prospects of innovation and creativity in your approach come down to situational awareness.
6. Inspiring Resilience
When you're in sales, you need to develop a winning attitude that is quite tangible to people around you. People should look at you and feel highly impressed by the attitude that never lets you give up. In sales you cannot be someone who gives up too soon, isn’t it? In other words, you need to manifest great resilience in your personality.
As a salesperson, you need exemplary resilience to embrace the challenges that the field of sales is known for. For instance, there will be times when your potential customers will look to test your confidence or make the situation awkward for you intentionally or unintentionally. In times like these, if you are not resilient enough to hold your ground, the expression of panic or sulking will be quite visible on your face. Eventually, that can put an end to the conversion conversation forever.
On the contrary, when you're resilient and take up every challenge that the smart customers throw at you, you will impress a lot of people. Furthermore, this impression is what you will capitalize on to convert your leads into customers. You need to keep asking yourself if you are doing enough to be more resilient every day.
7. Impressive Accountability
There would be times when you would have a good number of conversions against your name. On the contrary, there would also be times when a lot of leads may end up not purchasing from you. In either case, you have to be accountable and own up to everything you do as a salesperson. In any organization, people in sales are supposed to be responsible and accountable for their actions.
In fact, accountability is important in every job but in sales, it has to be one of the finest traits that you need to incorporate into your professional personality. Even the best salespeople do not come with a hundred percent conversion rate. In fact, you will be surprised to know that as per Marketing Insider Group, the average conversion rate in most industries is below 15 percent. So, let us say that at best, your conversion rate can be 50 percent to 60 percent.
Having said that, what makes a salesperson excellent is rather their accountability than the average conversion rate. Being accountable means you own up to the responsibility and are willing to learn in order to get better results the next time. For an employer, this trait will be quite reassuring.
Conclusion
To encapsulate, people in marketing are judged for their innovative ideas but when it comes to salespeople, their personality is what is noticed at first.
The relevance of first impressions is incredibly significant in sales. Even if you're virtually connecting with your leads, they will always try to assess your personality. They're looking at you as the representative of a brand and their only contact with the brand. Hence, they want you to be impressive for the overall perception of the brand to seem attractive.
Having said that, you need to work on the above personality traits to script your glory in sales.
