Key sales skills for the future

To understand key sales skills for the future, it is helpful to look back in time. Here’s 5 key dates in the development of sales skills:

5 key Sales Dates

1. 1898 – AIDA – E St Elmo Lewis developed the first sales process
2. 1914 – The Psychology of Selling – Forbes Lindsay documented the defined skills for insurance salesmen e.g. features & benefits, objection handling, closing and open & closed questioning skills
3. 1961 – The Mystique of Super-Salesmanship – McMurray defined the roles in terms of a spectrum from order takers to field salespeople.
4. 1985 – McMurray The Determinants of Salesperson Performance – Churchill
5. 1987 – Making Major Sales – Rackham

We go into more details on these in the post. “Are your sales techniques 100 years old?” (available in: Podcast, Video and Slideshare formats too). Most people are surprised by the dates on these key events. For example was it really over 100 years ago that features, advantages and benefits was being taught to insurance sales people by Forbes Lindsay? And let’s be clear there the incredulity is driven by the fact that many sales trainers and sales managers are driving those behaviours.

Looking Back at Sales Skills

So what are key sales skills for the future? If you have a sales person who does these then they are living in the past, the distant past:

1. Sells features & benefits
2. Self interest before customer interest
3. Standard pitch and patter
4. Reduces price to win the deal
5. Win lose mindset, looking to gain margin at the expense of the customer
6. Single point of contact, no breadth and depth across the customer organisation
7. Closes hard because value has not been created or communicated
8. Blames losses on price or customer bias and so cannot learn from the experience

Key Sales Skills for the Future

Here are the Salestrong key sales skills for the future:

1. Asking questions that create insights
2. Building trust and putting the customer needs first
3. Conversation is used to communicate in a synchronous way
4. Creates value and can communicate that value
5. Win Win mindset is used to create wins for both sides
6. Multiple contacts are used to understand the wider needs of the whole organisation
7. Contract up front so that expectations are managed and closing is a natural ending
8. Learns from lost deals in an accountable way so less deals are lost in the future

These are the key sales skills for today as well as the future. We see these skills in the STRONG sales people that we train and coach. What key sales skills for the future would you add to this list?