How to Improve Your Selling Skills

In nature, life is either growing or decaying; in sales, you are either getting better or you are getting left behind. No matter how good you are today, if you are not dedicated to constant improvement, tomorrow will find you a bit weaker in your sales skills.

While the differences may not be noticeable for a while, they will reveal themselves, positively or negatively, soon enough.

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How to Improve Sales Skills

Sometimes, the best way to improve at anything is to identify your mindset. Doing so may bring once hidden challenges to light and allow you to make rapid, effective and long-lasting improvements. For sales professionals, having an empowering daily schedule often makes a tremendous difference, and even a 1-percent improvement per day adds up over time.

Imagine a ship that is only 1-degree off-course. After a mile or two, the difference would be easily corrected. But over the course of a few days, the result of the ship's journey will be significantly different than what was originally planned for.

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How to Add More Profit to Your Deals

Profit is the king of sales. The more profit you can add to your sales, the more money you put in your pocket and the more job security you create for yourself.

But adding profit is not just about squeezing a customer for as much money as you can get from them: Instead, adding profit begins with adding value. Actual value and perceived value are what bring a low- to no-profit deal into the realm of profitability.

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Uncovering Pain Points

People buy either to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, and often they buy to accomplish both. If you sell products or services that aren't dripping with the "pleasure factor," you need to focus on uncovering as many pain points as possible.

Once uncovered, you need to show how your product or service can solve the pain.

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Learning How to Sell

Not everyone is born with the natural ability to be an effective sales professional. In fact, very few people are the proverbial "natural-born sales professional." Sales professionals are made, sculpted, trained and trained again over months, years and even decades.

For those new to a career in sales, your ability to learn the basics of how to sell will lay the groundwork for your future success.

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The 7 Steps of a Sales Cycle

Sales guru and professional speaker Brian Tracy believes that there are seven steps involved in every successful sales cycle. Mastering each step of the sales cycle is critically important for sales professionals. The old expression that states that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link holds very true for those in sales.

A sales professional is only as strong as his weakest area in any of the seven sales cycle steps.

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Sales Training

Learning something once is a wonderful way to be good at something for a very short time. In order to improve your sales skills long-term, you need a steady and healthy dose of training. Whether you receive training from your employer, a seminar, books, the Internet, a mentor or just from being acutely aware of your performance, training needs to happen every day.

While missing a day of training every now and then probably won't hurt you very much, imagine if a professional athlete decided that she had had enough training and didn't need anymore. A sales professional, like an athlete, cannot rest on their past successes or they will have very few, if any, future successes.