Hybrid work is here to stay, and the new normal for sales professionals has become more apparent. Gone are the days when salespeople were road warriors traveling to meet each customer. Now, a typical day may include a full day of back-to-back Zoom sales calls. Today’s modern sellers must be proficient in face-to-face and virtual selling. So what top sales skills are the most important for today’s modern seller?

Asking great questions is foundational to consultative selling, but for many sales reps, this is easier said than done.

Targeting and gaining access to key executives is challenging, yet we’ve all been told we need to do it in order to be more strategic and sell larger deals.

Like a championship sports team needs great athletes, exceptional salespeople are the lifeblood of a high-performing sales organization. But if you have recently recruited new salespeople,  you probably have also experienced how brutal it is to try to hire top talent in today's market. Even during more favorable hiring conditions, hiring sales executives is risky. Every sales manager has horror stories of hiring promising candidates who later were poor performers. 

Sitting next to me, collecting dust, is a relic of a by-gone era: my desk phone. My company recently moved away from a stand-alone office phone system to an integrated platform that combines virtual meeting functionality with chat and telephony.

For some people, the word “sales” comes along with its own set of baggage and negative connotations. Your point of reference may relate to your personal experience with an overly aggressive “sales pitch” while going on a timeshare tour on your vacation. Or encountering manipulative “fear tactics” to purchase an extended warranty when you purchased your dishwasher. Unfortunately, this connotation can also find its way into business-to-business sales situations where companies get push back from their sales engineers and solution consultants who say their job is to help customers solve a problem - not to sell them more services.