It is hard to pin down the profile of the prototypical good salesperson, but one thing is clear: someone who is a sales professional will end up selling in any industry. In fact, good salespeople share certain traits.
As we have said on other occasions, I have personally found that it is much easier to teach a good salesperson some complicated technical aspects of a product than to teach an expert in a particular subject how to sell.
Once, I was asked to prepare a group of people with a high level of technical and scientific knowledge to sell a product aimed at professionals in medicine and science. I could have spent months teaching these people sales techniques, but I could hardly have turned people with no sales traits and no passion for selling into excellent salespeople.
In the end, it was enough for the company to spend a little over two weeks teaching the technical knowledge to professional salespeople.
A bank manager once told me: “Come on, selling cars, books or building materials is not the same as selling a savings and investment service.” That premise is completely false, because a sale is a sale, and the requirements for a customer to buy your product are exactly the same: the customer wants to gain something from the purchase and must trust the product or service. Full stop. There are no special sales. There are only sales.
So we can build the first premise of sales
The best salespeople know that it is never about the product or the salesperson; it is always about improving the customer’s life. To do that, the customer must feel that the benefit they will get from the purchase is worth more than the price they will pay for it.
Forget this premise and you are forgetting the supreme principle of selling. Of course, later on, with certain techniques a salesperson can make a customer feel that buying a luxury car will change their life completely.
See also: How “learned helplessness” can affect our life, our career and our success
The man considered the world’s best car salesman, Joe Girard, was clear that only one formula worked in his sector: make sure the customer pays a fair price, and make the customer like you. This formula may seem simple, but it covers a whoooole world in sales and calls for certain traits that have been found in the best salespeople in various fields and industries. Fortunately, most of these traits can be worked on.
But keep a second premise of the sales world in mind
“People don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy.”
Now let’s move on to the essential traits that practically all the best salespeople share. At the end of this article you will also find a link to 15 habits of excellent salespeople.
The traits listed below were identified by Steve W. Martin in research in which he gave personality tests to top sales performers, finding that all of them shared the following traits:
5 traits the best salespeople have in common
1. Modesty and humility
Contrary to what certain films try to sell us, the truth is that sales, like investing, is not a sprint but a marathon. Nobody likes an arrogant, aggressive or alienating person, least of all a customer.
For some reason the arrogant personality has been associated with a competent salesperson, but nothing could be further from reality. In the long run this kind of personality falls behind in the race, overtaken by someone who builds long-term relationships with customers and the industry. For a long-term relationship to work, you need to be humble and modest, because everyone likes that and it creates immediate trust.
91% of the salespeople analysed by Steve W. Martin shared this trait.
2. Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is a trait that various studies have associated with success in any field. Let’s define it as “the precision and care you put into doing or examining something and into carrying out your tasks.” Its synonyms would be diligence, care, dedication, accuracy, thoroughness, precision…
The best professionals in any field and the best artists in history have always been those who took their work very seriously and felt deeply responsible for their results.
85% of the salespeople analysed by Steve W. Martin shared this trait.
3. Achievement orientation
Having defined goals and objectives, and competing hard with yourself to reach them, is what sets good salespeople apart from mediocre ones. For excellent salespeople, this job is not a way of passing the time until a better job comes along, but a career in which they will grow both professionally and personally.
84% shared this trait.
4. Curiosity
Curiosity did not only appear as a trait in 82% of the salespeople analysed. Curiosity has been found in the most brilliant minds and the best businesspeople. There is no other way to acquire knowledge and prosper than to be curious: to be hungry for knowledge, to keep growing.
In fact, Brian Tracy said he had an infallible question for hiring the best salespeople. He would ask them which sales books they had in their personal library and which was their favourite sales book. If the candidate said they had no sales books, Tracy showed them to the door immediately, because someone who wants to work in sales and has not been curious enough to read about the field they want to work in is unlikely to end up a good salesperson.
(See: The 16 best quotes on sales and negotiation)
5. Positivity
We won’t talk again about the advantages of being a positive person in every respect, but if one trait happens to be present in 90% of the best salespeople, it is the absence of sadness and problems in their day-to-day lives. They are not so afraid of rejection by customers; they know it is part of their profession and of the statistics. They don’t focus on those rejections, but on the next customer they have to visit.
Their friendly, cheerful and positive character rubs off on the customer, so the “infected” customer ends up seeing the purchase as something more positive.
Without a doubt, emotional exhaustion is the factor that most often leads salespeople to change careers. But let me tell you something: I don’t think it is a matter of emotional exhaustion caused by the job itself. If there is one thing we have been able to see by now, it is that the people who end up thinking negatively and emotionally drained by their profession in sales (or any other) are also the ones who don’t know how to handle the problems in their personal lives properly. So it is not a question of profession, but of personality.
Once we have identified the most important traits, they need to be accompanied by certain working methods that salespeople should have, for example:
- Keep moving forward.
- Learn from mistakes and failures (resilience).
- Plan their working day (or week).
- Focus only on what matters.
- Have time for themselves.
- Set monthly goals, but break them down into daily objectives.
And the most important one: wanting to help the customer
The smooth talker with aggressive, hard-sell techniques may work for a while, and may even earn more money in the short term than the best salespeople, but he is the one who ends up giving a bad name to this profession that I love so much, and who ends up becoming someone people can’t trust in his profession.
While some salespeople look for strategies to “slip” a deception past the customer, good salespeople sincerely think about adding value for the customer, about helping the customer, about building a good reputation with their customers. Every salesperson should know that if you help a customer with integrity and honesty through your product or service, that customer will speak well of you, will bring you more customers and, tomorrow, if you sell another product, will know that you are someone they can trust.
If you look after a customer, you will have an asset that pays off for life.
See also: 15 habits of successful salespeople
Featured image: unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
