Sales is not about manipulating your customer. Sales is about partnering with your customer. Sales is not about dazzling with data. Sales is about making it easy for your customer to buy. Sales is not a battle, or a cage match, or about facing off with an enemy. Sales is about mutual respect and mutual purpose.

Some sales are lost due to poor communication skills. Since you don’t ever want to lose a sale for that reason Ryan Taft has come up with a few communication tips to help you with your customers.

In my last blog post I wrote about the single most under appreciated skill set of a great sales professional: confidence. I suggested that confidence is the intersection of two critical components: belief and mastery. In the previous post I wrote about belief; in this post I want to tackle the subject of mastery.

Entitled buyers get a bad rap. We label them as “difficult,” “rude,” or “mean” when really they are often just fighting for the basic entitlements that all buyers deserve. All buyers are entitled to our respect and our professionalism, as Amy O’Connor shares in her story of when she was an entitled buyer.

Let me put this bluntly. Confidence is the single most under appreciated skill set of a great sales professional. A lack of confidence is a recipe for mediocrity. An abundance of confidence is evident in every top performing sales professional. But what exactly is confidence?

As Ryan Taft travels the country, he loves to study how people ask for the sale. He loves the art of closing. Here’s the challenge. More often than not, he doesn’t hear actual closes, instead, he hears what he calls “presentation enders.” A true close elicits action to purchase.

Too often salespeople mistakenly believe that the entire sales process is relational, but that the close is procedural. We build a great relationship by discovering needs and demonstrating the product, but we shift to a different mindset when we get to the close. Closing questions should flow naturally and confidently from the relational tone found in the rest of the sales conversation.

Proper influence and persuasion is about making it easy for people to do what is in their best interest to do. Our job in sales is to help people achieve whatever mission they are on. The best helpers are the most successful sale people. How do you become more helpful? Amy O’Connor says to focus on these three character traits.

You’ve been working with a customer for some time but you can’t seem to get them over the edge. What small little token would send a message that says, “You’re special”? What are you doing, in your presentation or your follow-up, that is enhancing your customers experience and making for a more memorable occurrence?

Empathy can be a hard thing to master, and Ryan Taft admits that it is not his greatest strength. He does however, have an awesome technique to use in order to have empathy towards a person rather than getting frustrated with them. The “What If” technique can be a great way to reroute your negativity and turn it into something positive.