Professional Selling Skills

One of the most development approach of sales person (medical rep) is professional selling skills. Where attitude is born skills can be learned. Skills like; selling, communication and negotiation skills.

Professional selling skills describes how sales person interacts with customer from approaching him to close the sales and also after sales follow up. This also call sales call steps .We will describe professional selling skills as sales call process.

 Most training programs view the selling process as several steps that the salesperson must master these call steps focus on the goal of getting new customers and obtaining orders from them.

Sales call steps overlap or may occur simultaneously. Some steps may occur quickly while others can be very slow. Many writers develop their own set of sales call steps to describe the personal selling process and how sales person apply professional selling skills in each step.

Whatever the steps sequences, they include essentially the same activities. We will follow Anderson 1995 who breaks the Professional selling process into seven steps. These seven steps and objectives rom it are:

1. Prospecting and Qualifying means find and qualify the customer.
2. Planning and preparation means setting SMART objectives of the call.
3. Approach means meet and great the customer.
4. Presentation / Need identification means identify customer’s need through probing and then tailor product’s benefits according to need.
5. Handling customer’s response means to handle customer’s objection and reach agreement about product benefits and resolve any customer’s concern.
6. Closing means gaining customer commitment.
7. Follow-Up means follow customer’s promises and try to build long lasting relation (rapport).

In each step sales person must know how to apply in proper way and utilize product’s knowledge and present it to persuade customer to buy. We can also divide these steps into three stages:

1. Pre-call stage: this includes steps 1 and 2 where sales person or medical rep in not face to face with customer.
2. Call stage: this includes step 3, 4, 5, 6 where sales person or medical rep is face to face with customer.
3. Post call stage: this includes step 7 where sales person or medical rep leaves the customer after finishing the call.

Finally one of the most important concern about professional selling skills that in each sales call steps sales person can apply part of this skills and can also apply communication and negotiation skills.