What is sales acumen?
Sales acumen is the ability to understand and anticipate customer needs and take appropriate action to close sales. It’s a critical skill for anyone in sales, whether you’re selling products or services.
If you want to be successful in sales, it’s crucial that you are able to identify sales opportunities in the marketplace. Not just that, you have to know what to do to fully capitalize on those opportunities and what to do when a prospect objects to the sale.
Sales acumen also involves having a keen understanding of what motivates customers and what drives them to make purchase decisions. This business knowledge can be used to create effective sales strategies that result in more closed deals and happier customers.
How Do You Demonstrate Sales Acumen?
Much like business acumen, developing sales acumen takes time and experience. It takes a commitment to work on your skills and to continually improve as a salesperson.
Once you have developed that strong sales acumen, negotiating and closing sales becomes a lot easier. And that’s the goal of every salesperson. But how can you demonstrate sales acumen? Importantly, how do you develop it?
People who have strong sales acumen share common traits. These are the traits you need to develop and continually improve to get better as a salesperson.
1 Self-motivation
If you’re looking to build a successful sales career, you’ll need to be self-motivated. Self-motivation means being constantly on the lookout for new prospects, knowing that they will not offer themselves to you.
The best salespeople are self-starters. They diligently work to improve their skills as well as their understanding of the products or services they are tasked with selling. Only when you know your products well can you answer questions that potential customers might have.
If you’re a sales representative with a knack for finding new customers, you’re always on the lookout for your next prospect. You don’t wait for someone to reach out to you; instead, you proactively seek out potential leads.
Self-motivated sales reps are always looking for your next potential client. They don’t wait for leads to contact them before looking for the next deal. They’re eager for the chance to make a new contact and see if you can make a sale.
2 Strong communication skills
Salespeople need to be able to clearly explain the benefits or features of their product or service, as well as listen to the customer’s needs and concerns. And for that, they need to be capable communicators.
Strong communication skills are crucial for rapport building, which is the first step in the rep’s engagement with the prospect. You need to build rapport to convince the prospect to take the sales discussion to the next level.
With that rapport built up, it becomes easier to gain the prospect’s trust and build a relationship that not only helps to close sales but to gain repeat sales as well.
3 Empathy
An important sign of strong sales acumen is the ability of a salesperson to put themselves in the shoes of the customer. It is the emotional intelligence that is necessary to understand from their perspective the problem a prospect is looking to address with your product.
It helps build a strong relationship with prospects to simply show that you care and empathize with them. Sometimes that’s all you need to jump the queue and get ahead of the other options the prospect may be considering.
4 The ability to read between the lines
Good salespeople have a special ability to read sales situations. They can read between the lines and know how to proceed when a prospect is exhibiting specific behavior.
It’s critical for sales success to know when to push forward, when to back off and when to follow up later with a prospect. This is a skill that takes time to develop but is absolutely critical for a rep.
Reading between the lines also means the ability to understand what a prospect is really saying, even when they’re not saying it. Within those unspoken messages that prospects sometimes convey often lie clues on what you have to do to close a sale.
Some customers simply can’t ‘yes’, but they can say ‘no’. So that they are not saying anything may, in fact, mean they are not objecting to your sales proposal. You have to assume that the sale is there to close, and you go ahead and close it.
5 Persistence
Good salespeople persist even when faced with tough odds and rejection by prospects. The best can turn rejection into a sale. They also don’t let negative reactions to a pitch stop them from pursuing other sales.
It’s a sign of strong sales acumen when a salesperson keeps their cool and keeps chipping away at it when sales are not closing at a good rate. That breed of salesperson is patient doesn’t get desperate, and never doubts themselves when things aren’t going so well.
Sales professionals with a keen understanding of the market do not see rejection as a common occurrence but instead, see it as a challenge to overcome in order to acquire new customers.
By approaching each prospect with confidence, the sales rep can turn any potential rejection into an opportunity for a sale. That’s probably the one skill that those getting into sales need to develop the most as those early days when you are inexperienced are the hardest.
Final Word on How to Build and Demonstrate Strong Sales Acumen
Sales acumen is about making sound judgments in every sales situation so you can take quick effective decisions. So if you want to be successful in sales, it’s imperative that you have strong sales acumen.
You need strong sales acumen to make compelling presentations, negotiate more persuasively, overcome objections, close more deals, and make a comfortable living as a salesperson.
The traits we have discussed are that silver bullet you have been looking for. Work on your communication skills, show empathy, communicate better, grow a thick skin, persist through challenges, get more perceptive in your evaluation of different sales situations, and your sales acumen will be as good as the best salespeople in your field.
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