The perfect salesperson profile

Nowadays, organizations do not only depend on excellent products or services to be successful in the market. It also requires marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, distribution logistics, variables that together will lead a company to success.

Within these variables, the consolidation of a sales force is a fundamental and integral part of an SME's growth. What would the insurance industry be, for example, without the insurance agents who are in charge of transmitting the benefits of life insurance? Because, let’s face it, no one lines up to buy life insurance. Or what would network marketing companies -better known as multilevel marketing- be without the millions of people who are part of their sales force?

The secret is in the people

By contrast to large corporations where huge investments in advertising media virtually guarantee that their products will "sell themselves", the vast majority of SMEs use sales forces to market their products and this makes a fundamental difference.

Success depends on the talent of the sales force, which not only depends on their training in the product, but also on a series of personal attributes that the sales agent must possess. The reality is that not all people have the same characteristics and, therefore, not all of them are apt to perform successfully in sales.

The successful salesperson

To succeed in sales, we must ensure that we hire people with the personality traits of the best salespeople in the world. Some of these traits or characteristics are:

Extroverted. People who do not have problems speaking in public because sometimes it will be necessary to make sales presentations for more than one person, and an introverted salesperson would have more difficulties to do it.

Self-motivated. One of the most important factors when we work with people are the emotional changes that we tend to suffer constantly: anger, depression, joy, disappointment. All of these have an impact on the work environment. Salespeople are no exception and success in sales depends to a large extent on salespeople being able to control their emotions, self-motivate themselves to keep up the pace of work and achieve their goals.

Disciplined. In most companies, salespeople's job is to ´walk the streets´ in search of new prospects. This makes them difficult to monitor and control. Consequently, if the salesperson is not self-disciplined and chooses to rest or do personal activities instead of sales presentations, the company will not achieve its goals and the salespeople will eventually lose their jobs.

Able to socialize. Being extroverted does not guarantee success as a salesperson. It also requires that the person be able to establish bonds of trust with the customer, as the more the customer trusts the salesperson, a higher volume of sales will be achieved. It is relatively easy to sell a product once; the hard part is getting the customer to buy from you regularly, in which respect the customer-salesperson relationship is a key factor.

With drive. What happens to many salespeople is what happens to marathon runners when they reach the finish line: they collapse and take a long time to recover. This reaction is due to the fact that many people are used to short term goals and not long-term ones. A person with drive is one who, when about to reach a goal, instead of slowing down, speeds up and runs one more mile.

Tolerant of frustration. Many people are so affected by being told 'no' that it is reason enough for them to get discouraged and quit working for a company. Salespeople should know that sales work is a job of probabilities, where positive and negative responses are received, and the more sales presentations they make, the more positive responses they will receive.

Empathetic. It is the ability of people to 'put themselves in the other person's shoes'. When a salesperson manages to be empathetic with his customer, he has gained an ally within the organization. This characteristic is a priority to handle objections from prospects to make a purchase, as well as to solve problems that arise with customers.

With a service attitude. We live in highly competitive times, where service is the indispensable attitude to increase and keep the customer portfolio. In the past it was thought that having a good product was enough to maintain the commercial relationship with customers. Nowadays, it has been proven that people who do not provide a service that distinguishes their company, condemn it to imminent failure.

Some of these are just some of the characteristics considered by the most successful companies in the people who will be part of their sales force. It is desirable to find people who meet most of these characteristics, as they will be more likely to be the most successful salespeople in your organization.

The cost of hiring a person who does not have any of the above-mentioned characteristics can be high. For this reason, it is recommended to seek specialized help in the area of recruitment and selection of personnel. There are many companies that provide this type of services at affordable prices for an SME. The companies that hire the right people are the ones that are having the greatest growth in the market, because no matter how good the product or service they offer is, if they do not have the right people, they will never be successful.

Carlos Slim -a distinguished Mexican businessman and one of the richest men in the world- updated an old Chinese proverb saying: ´Nowadays, it is not enough to know how to fish, you have to know how to sell and distribute the fish´.