{"id":2354,"date":"2010-06-24T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T21:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2010\/06\/social-skills-vs-sales-skills\/"},"modified":"2010-06-24T15:55:41","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T20:55:41","slug":"social-skills-vs-sales-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2010\/06\/social-skills-vs-sales-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Skills vs. Sales Skills"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re talking you\u2019re not selling.\u00a0 That is an old axiom I learned early in my sales career and it is always true.\u00a0 Talking does not<\/em> equal selling.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, people not experienced in sales hiring often have the opposite view.\u00a0 Their stereotypical belief is that the best salespeople are the ones who are perceived to be the best talkers.\u00a0 This misguided view often leads to bad hires.<\/p>\n

Here is where the mistake occurs \u2013 hiring managers assume that social skills are equivalent to sales skills.\u00a0 Ok, maybe that is too strong, but the assumption is that the social skills are the key to successful selling.\u00a0 Social skills are a component to selling, but they are not indicative of sales skills.<\/p>\n

Social Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n

Social skills are important to sales and certainly are not to be ignored.\u00a0 However, my experience has been that the truly terrible sales hires usually involved bad salespeople with good social skills.\u00a0 These salespeople had excellent empathetic skills \u2013 they could read body language, adjust their tonality, find common ground with the hiring manager.\u00a0 Again, all valuable skills.\u00a0 However, they had next to no sales skills which became evident once they were on the payroll torpedoing good prospects.<\/p>\n

The danger here is that these social skills are quite disarming.\u00a0 They can be used to get the strongest of interviewers off their game.\u00a0 I have seen many sales candidates who possessed remarkable social skills but little in the way of sales skills.<\/p>\n

Sales Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n

These skills are the ones that lead to profitable revenue generation.\u00a0 The main skill set involves qualifying.\u00a0 If there was only one ability you could have in a salesperson, qualifying would be it.\u00a0 This skill involves asking the right questions to learn about a potential customers\u2019 budget, need, time frame, decision process and more.\u00a0 This skill is where salespeople earn their keep.<\/p>\n

Other sales skills areas are prospecting, influencing, closing and presenting.\u00a0 These areas are also important to successful selling.\u00a0 In terms of sales candidates, these skills are more difficult to discover.\u00a0 The best approach is to assess for these skills<\/a> and then follow up a face-to-face interview with the candidate to probe the information you have gathered through the assessment.<\/p>\n

Objectivity is key and it is critical in making a hiring decision.\u00a0 The strongest sales candidate isn\u2019t necessarily the most talkative, humorous or outgoing.\u00a0 Pay close attention to the questions they ask and the answers they provide to your probing questions about their sales skills.<\/p>\n

And be sure to assess them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"