5 Tips for Evaluating Your Customer Facing Skills

The world of sales has always been a highly competitive market, no matter the product or service you’re selling. Remember, whenever there’s an opportunity to sell, there’s likely to be competition. And while your product or service is all important in winning out, your best tool for fighting off the competition is your customer facing skills and mannerisms.

As a result of the digital revolution, there’s even more competition than before, thanks to the increasing number of online platforms providing extra sales opportunities. In the past, phone calls and meetings were the main methods of obtaining a potential sale, but these days you can add email, social media and online video to the list. This means being able to connect with your customer is even more important to make sure your pitch hits.

To be effective in this ever changing and increasingly competitive market, it’s essential that you evaluate your sales techniques and customer facing skills. To achieve this, reflect on the different platforms you use for reaching out to potential leads and consider ways to refresh and boost your communication skills with our five top techniques below.

1. Create a Natural Feel

Traditional sales pitches can seem forced, dull and outdated in the modern world. They’re not necessarily dead, but rather evolving both on and offline . A big part of this is the movement away from the standard presentation and towards forming a natural conversation, with a greater focus on helping rather than directly selling something.

Look over your most recent pitches and evaluate whether they fall under the more traditional techniques or adopt a modern style. To create a natural feel for your meetings, face-to-face presentations, cold calling and online communication, you need to make sure your language is conversational and that nothing feels forced or scripted.

Starting up a conversation and focusing on providing solutions to the target audience’s problems, rather than selling your product or service directly, can help achieve a natural impression.

2. Demonstrate Value

Talking about how great the product or service you’re selling is may impress potential clients and customers, but will it persuade them to invest? Whoever’s hearing your pitch needs to understand why it will add value to them in their day to day life.

You can do this through providing real life examples, either of where the product or service has helped other clients in the past, or by showing instances tailored to the audience. Of course, this means obtaining an understanding of the person or business you’re selling to and how your product or service can help them with the challenges they face. Financial value is also important, so being able to display the potential ROI helps get across how your product or service will add to the customer’s income.

3. Make it Personal

Adding a personal touch is a common technique that most salespeople will claim they already do. You may be surprised when evaluating your customer facing skills to learn that they all follow a similar structure, however. Aside from adding in the client’s name, logo and referring to them in the second person, many aspects are likely to be easily interchangeable.

No matter who you’re contacting, the sales pitch should feel fresh and personal, not like it’s been rolled out 20 times before. Particularly when cold calling, a personal touch can make all the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. To do this effectively, spend plenty of time researching the individual or company being contacted, so that whatever form the pitch takes, it will resonate with them clearly. This can even help shape the pitch itself.

4. Use Positive Language

Your use of language plays an important role when attempting to inspire people and businesses to buy into what you’re selling. This transcends both the spoken word used in meetings, face-to-face pitches and videos, as well as written communication such as online posts, social media messages and emails.

While a nice, lengthy description may provide a lot of information about a particular product, if it’s too wordy or technical it can be off-putting. A simple description isn’t particularly inspiring either, so use positive and persuasive language. Adjectives that paint the product or service in a good light and get across the values and benefits for the target market will help. Some examples of this include:

• Affordable
• Best
• Convenient
• Fast
• New
• Safe
• Timesaving

5. Improve Sales Skills

If you’ve evaluated your customer facing skills and identified some gaps, the next stage is to make sure the skills are there within your team. There are a few ways to go about this, starting with sales training from Pareto. These training courses teach high impact presenting and telephone sales skills that can refresh your team’s abilities.

Alternatively, you may want to introduce some new talent through sales recruitment. New starters might offer different ways of thinking which could lead to new techniques to develop more effective pitches. Graduate sales recruitment especially can bring in knowledgeable young salespeople with innovative ideas.

Communication skills are pivotal for any sales techniques to succeed. It’s important to regularly review them to make sure yours are as effective as possible. Learn more about our sales training courses and improve your sales techniques in 2019 with Pareto.