Difference between poor and good salesmen

You might have heard that people need to have good talking skills in order to be good salesman. But this is not true. We do not need to be a great talker in order to be a good salesman. However there is something else we need to be good at in order to succeed at selling. Read on to know about it.

If someone has excellent talking skills, then it might certainly be to his/her advantage in selling but this skill is not an absolutely necessity. More than talking skills, what we need are excellent listening skills.

If you get a chance to observe or study about successful salespeople, you can notice how each one of them pays special undivided attention to the customer. They listen intently to what the customer is saying, watch their gestures and reactions and notice even tiny movements and facial expressions of the customers.

They want to find out what kind of effect they are having on the customers and they are interested in learning the problems, goals and priorities of the customer. Almost all successful salesmen without exception are good at listening skills.

If you are able to study and observe in detail good and poor salesmen, you may certainly notice that one major difference between them is that poor salesmen are usually poor listeners. They usually do not pay proper attention to the customer and are more focused on what they have to say.

These poor salesmen usually believe that selling means to impress the customer with your talking skills and knowledge about the product.

They, poor salesmen, just go on babbling about their product, service or company without stopping to see if the customer is really interested in their speech or not.

The good salesmen on the other hand, pay close attention to the customers and try to gain as much knowledge of the customers as possible. They try to find out what the customer's needs are and whether their product or service can satisfy those needs or not.

If we are trying to market something to people, we all should start our selling by knowing the customers' needs first before we even start our talk.

By first gaining as much knowledge about the customer as possible, and knowing about their needs and buying criteria, we can easily focus our selling efforts on those things so that we have an excellent chance of making a sale.

So you see, selling is not about making a great sales pitch. Its more about asking the right questions, finding out answers to all the important questions about your customer and knowing about them first. This is possible only if we pay close attention and listen properly to the customer.

In order to be able to give ourselves enough to work with, it is recommended to know atleast 3 needs of our customer before we begin talking about our product or service. By gaining as much knowledge as possible about our customer, we can be in a better position to convince him/her to try out our product/service.

We can gain knowledge about our customer by asking questions and listening intently to them. For this we need to work on our listening skills. We need to develop our listening skills a lot.

Always try to remember that selling is not a one-sided affair, but a two way communication. It is not just about talking about our products but also about listening to customer's needs.

Good selling is about knowing your customer's needs, problems and priorities and then working out and mentioning how our product or service can satisfy those needs.