Soft Skills: How to Align the Heart with the Brain of a Salesperson.
- Nathalia Luque
- Jul 24
- 3 min read
I am talking to you, Salesperson, because I know that at some point you have had to sell something, whether it be your Personal Brand, your Professional Brand, a Product, a Service, your Business Venture, a Project, etc. And if you have chosen to do so through #SocialSelling and use Social Media as Business Intelligence Platforms, you have chosen the best springboard to boost sales.
And what #SoftSkills should a #DigitalSalesperson have, develop, and leverage?
Soft skills are a buzzword that recruiters and companies are asking for.
What are they?
Where are they learned?
“They are skills associated with the personality and/or nature of the individual, which are demonstrated in the performance of work and are not only related to knowledge but also to the implementation of a combination of social skills, communication skills, aptitudes, and the ability to approach others.” They are how we connect our heart with our brain.
How interesting! Therefore, they are not learned in schools. Many of them are perhaps genetic or inherited. I'll leave that discussion to the experts. I just think that we are born with many of these skills and we develop and enrich them with experience and practice. Here we can also get into the age-old controversial discussion of “whether a salesperson is born or made,” which is not the subject of this article, but my position is that it is a bit of both.
So, what are the “soft skills” that define a digital salesperson? We will discuss three main ones:
Relationship building. Here I refer to the definition given by Jill Rowley (Queen of Social Selling), who says that social selling is “building relationships that generate revenue.” It is the most important pillar of this sales technique.
If the customer does not trust you, it will be very difficult to sell them anything. This is how we generate empathy and trust with “strangers” to turn them into “friends,” and then these friends spontaneously become “CUSTOMERS.” The inevitable consequence is that our CUSTOMERS become our best “salespeople.”
This is closely linked to assertive communication, how we use language to express ourselves at the right time in the right way, while respecting other people's positions.
And this is where we fail, myself included, as I also fell into this trap.
You may have experienced someone accepting your invitation to connect, thanking you for it, and immediately sending you their portfolio of products and/or services. Cold calling is a mortal sin!
They have made no effort to build a relationship or generate trust, nor were they assertive or chose the right moment.
The communication we have on social media is our voice. It is part of our personal brand. It allows us to approach prospects, enter and remain in their minds, provide them with “value,” solve their needs, and become market leaders. All of this is nothing more than Marketing 3.0.
And finally, closely linked to this is active listening, which seems easy but is actually quite complex. We always come to the conclusion that we don't know how to “listen” and that we would do well to listen twice as much as we speak (hence the analogy that we have two ears and only one mouth for a reason).
I quote the words of Retail Master Harry J. Friedman, who says that “When the CUSTOMER is talking, the CUSTOMER is buying,” and we must also put this into practice on social media, because social media speaks. We must develop the skill of “social listening,” which is a very rich and valuable source of information about who my customer is, what they need, what they are looking for, and what they are suffering from.
As we can conclude, the soft skills that a digital salesperson must have are no different from those of a traditional salesperson, and this is my invitation: to transform ourselves, to continue to evolve, to put all these offline sales skills into practice and now bring them to the online world. Let us remember, as @Jose Maria Vich wisely says: “The executive who is not digital will no longer be an executive.”
#SocialSelling is a #different #way of doing #things.
@Nathalia Luque is a salesperson and coach by vocation, with a humanistic approach based on her training as a health professional.
You can follow her at www.linkedin.com/in/nathalialuque
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