To find and win business consistently, you need the right mix of sales skills across the sales process, from filling the front-end of the pipeline to growing accounts. Too many sales teams have significant skill deficits preventing them from turning their potential for growth into reality.
In our The Top-Performing Sales Organization study, we looked at the differences between Top Performers and The Rest across sales skills and knowledge needed to drive sales performance. The gaps in skills are eye-opening.
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Top Sales Skills by Performance Group |
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Essential Sales Skills for Success
Note that most of these skills require a range of capabilities for sellers to truly excel. In addition to each top skill uncovered by research, we’ve included notes on how some of these capabilities drive success.
1. Driving and Winning Sales Opportunities
This area includes both the strategy and understanding of how to win sales opportunities and the skills needed to do so. Sellers need to be able to sell if they want to succeed. Seems obvious, but many sellers don't have the skills necessary to bring major opportunities across the finish line.
Sellers who keep their sales cycles short and can move opportunities from one stage to the next are more likely to be Top Performers. These sellers know how to differentiate, drive urgency with their buyers, and negotiate for favorable outcomes.
It may sound redundant to hear that the best sellers drive sales, but these sellers understand the stages of the sales funnel and how to align to the buying process to make the sale as seamless as possible for the buyer.
Collaboration
When you collaborate with your buyers, you're more likely to win. Working with buyers to craft solutions gives them ownership and helps get them invested. Done well, collaboration can help build your champions on the buying team.
As part of driving collaboration with buyers, you’ll need to be proactive, helpful, and able to introduce buyers to new ideas and perspectives.
Differentiation
Modern selling places more emphasis on the role of the seller in driving differentiation throughout the sales process. Even if your offering is superior to others, it means nothing if you can’t communicate that to your buyers.
Top sellers differentiate in four areas:
- Yourself: How will you stand out with the buyer on a personal and professional level?
- Your Offering: What factors make your solutions stand out compared to other options?
- Your Company: What have you achieved for other buyers in the past, and what kind of reputation does your organization have?
- Eventual Results: What can buyers expect if they work with you? What does success look like for them?
2. Core Consultative Selling
Consultative selling has long been the traditional approach to selling, but it's no longer enough to succeed in the current sales environment.
Even so, consultative selling skills are the foundation to learn buyer needs, build rapport, and deliver a compelling value proposition. If you can master these skills, you can build on them and learn new methods to attract buyer attention and drive value for them.
Nearly two-thirds of Top Performers have core consultative selling skills compared to less than half of The Rest, and nearly half of Top Performers have advanced consultative selling skills compared to less than one-third of The Rest.
Consultative selling has changed more in the last 5 years than it had in the previous 30. You need to keep up if you want to survive and thrive in today's sales world.
Read: The Future of Consultative Selling
Active Listening
One of the most impactful skills for sales is also one of the most basic. Listening to buyers is critical—whether you’re discovering their needs, handling objections, or building rapport.
Active listening means engaging when appropriate, striving to understand what the buyer values, and asking strong follow-up questions.
Communication
Sales are won and lost based on the conversations you have with buyers. Seemingly minor missteps can derail a sale, and once a buyer’s trust is lost, it can be challenging to get it back.
Leading effective sales conversations is a balancing act. You need to get them talking about what they need, but also need to provide your own guidance and introduce them to new possibilities.
3. Filling the Pipeline
One of the most common areas of stress in a sales organization is generating new opportunities. Even now, in the age of inbound marketing, most sellers are expected to prospect and generate a certain amount of their own leads in order to succeed.
Top sellers are proactive about filling their pipelines and don't wait until their leads dry up to prospect. Many sellers don't prospect as much or as consistently as they should. The best sellers put systems in place to attract potential leads, harness the power of referrals, and dedicate time for prospecting activities.
Prospecting
Four key strategies define the prospecting approach used by top sellers, which we refer to as WAVE:
- Winner’s Mindset: Motivate yourself, stick with prospecting, and build your confidence.
- Attraction Campaign: An organized sequence of outreach customized to the buyer, with the intent of generating a meeting.
- Value: Why should your prospects engage with you? Give them a compelling reason to do so.
- Execution: Many prospecting plans fall through when sellers don’t stick to them. Hold yourself accountable and prospect consistently.
Generating Referrals
Referrals are among the best ways of driving new business, but many sellers don’t have the structures in place to generate them. If you can design a referral system to work in parallel with your larger prospecting plan, you’ll have another avenue for keeping your pipeline full before it dries up.
Social Selling
Social media has long since been essential for reaching prospects and demonstrating your value as a seller. Be aware of how you look on social; buyers are likely to look you up.
Social media is both a channel for outreach as part of a larger prospecting campaign and a valuable tool for discovering and researching new prospects. Done well, you can use social selling to build inroads to leads well before you reach out to them.
Training Programs for Key Sales Skills
4. Driving Account Growth
Existing accounts represent a major untapped source of revenue for many sales teams. Top-Performing Sellers actively strategize and drive value for existing accounts.
Account growth requires a thorough knowledge of offerings, a strong needs discovery process, and alignment with a buyer's strategic agenda. However, repeat business and retention has an outsize impact on sales results and shouldn't be overlooked.
Most companies agree there is significant opportunity to grow existing accounts. The biggest difference between Top Performers and The Rest is "our sales organization is effective at maximizing sales to existing clients." Only 32% of The Rest agree, compared to 61% of Top Performers. It's important to note that The Rest represents 80% of the companies surveyed.
Infographic: 6 Roles of Strategic Account Managers
Relationship Building
Building client relationships and loyalty improves your chances of growing key accounts. Buyer satisfaction starts in the sales process; you’ll need to proactively build trust and work to address concerns.
After the initial sale, there’s still more to do. The best account management organizations don’t just leave it to chance; they have systems in place to maintain relationships and engage with clients.
Customer Support
The best-case scenario for your accounts is that they view you as a trusted partner—someone they can reach out to for advice and insights. If they bring you questions or issues, resolve them quickly.
However, customer support is also proactive. If you’ve done your homework on the client’s needs and pain points, you’ll be poised to address them when they come up and convert them into opportunities to grow the account.
Further, by deeply understanding your customer and their business, you can position yourself as a strategic advisor—offering fresh ideas, uncovering new possibilities, and helping them navigate challenges in ways they may not have considered.
5. Developing Executive Relationships
Selling to the C-suite is intimidating, but many sellers lose out on opportunities by not doing so. The truth is, selling to executives is doable but requires a different approach than normal sales. It's a common misconception that it's near-impossible to get face time with key executives, so if you're willing to put in the work to do so, you gain a key advantage over others.
Leading with Value
When selling to an executive-level buyer, you have a limited window to make your case and engage with them. Get too bogged down in detail and you’ll lose their attention.
Come into meetings prepared with an agenda that goes the extra mile to address their priorities. Think big-picture; most executives will be the most concerned with how your solution impacts their long-term strategy.
Conversations
Leading conversations with senior executives requires a particular emphasis on time management and specificity. You’ll need to capture their attention by proving your own expertise, and then leverage this attention into a concise conversation in which you share how you can drive impactful change for them.
Don’t get too stuck on the minutiae, but don’t ignore it either. You’ll likely face scrutiny from executives, so be prepared to answer questions.
6. Managing Time, Focus, and Personal Effectiveness
It's as important for sellers to spend their time well as it is to excel at key skills. Top-Performers spend their time effectively, maintaining their focus and devoting their time to activities that yield the best results for them.
Like any other sales capability, time management can be developed through specific skills and behaviors. The sellers that do so don't just do more—they're often healthier and happier with their jobs.
Productivity Habits
Your productivity habits are only as strong as your commitment to them. No single habit works for everyone, but RAIN Group’s research has identified 9 core habits and 12 key drivers of extreme productivity that set the most productive sellers apart.
One behavior that stands out: Accountability. The most productive sellers—what we call the Extremely Productive—are 2.2x more likely to hold themselves accountable for their time and their actions. Without accountability, even the best productivity strategies fail.
Time Management
The most productive sellers are intentional about how they use their time. They take proactive steps to minimize distractions, focus on high-value activities, and minimize low-impact tasks. They don’t just perform better—they’re also happier.
7. Advanced Consultative Selling
Good sellers sell solutions; great sellers introduce new ideas that solve the root of the buyer's problem. This process of leading valuable conversations that uncover needs and educate buyers on new possibilities is known as advanced consultative selling, or Insight Selling.
Today's buyers are flooded with information and choices, and Top-Performing Sellers can guide them through endless possibilities and share new ideas that drive change and fit their needs.
Storytelling
One of the best ways to get buyers excited about your solution is by telling a convincing story. The basic story structure is simple: you must communicate to buyers the need for immediate change and why and how you’re the best choice to bring about that change.
Solution Crafting
If you can craft a solution that inspires buyers to achieve a new reality, you’ll be a favorite to win the sale. One way to communicate your solution early and effectively is through a Buyer Change Blueprint, a visual framework that highlights the results you can drive for your buyer.
8. Managing and Coaching Sellers
Less than 50% of Top-Performing Sales Organizations have sales managers with the skills they need to effectively lead their teams. Among other organizations, that number drops to 31%—meaning if you line up 10 sales managers at these companies, seven of them lack the necessary skills to drive seller success.
From developing seller capabilities to ensuring operational consistency and building confidence, the success of a sales organization hinges on the strength of its management team. The good news? Sales management skills can be developed. Organizations that invest in training and optimizing their managers can see stronger sales performance, greater seller engagement, and a more consistent pipeline of high achievers.
Continuous Learning
Sales training is an ongoing process. While onboarding builds initial skills, the most effective organizations embed continuous learning into their culture. Without reinforcement and ongoing skills development, adoption stalls, performance plateaus, and results suffer. To drive continuous learning, organizations should:
- Integrate ongoing sales training that reinforces key skills and expands capabilities
- Encourage peer-to-peer learning to share best practices across the team
- Leverage sales coaching to provide targeted development and skill refinement
Consistent Coaching
Sales coaching isn’t just for underperformers—it’s a performance multiplier for sellers at every level.
To implement effective coaching:
- Establish a structured coaching cadence—weekly, biweekly, or monthly—based on your team’s needs
- Ensure coaching sessions are action-oriented with clear goals, feedback, and next steps
- Adapt coaching approaches to individual seller strengths and development areas
The best sales organizations make coaching an ongoing, strategic priority, not an afterthought.
9. Sales Negotiation
Even when a seller successfully close deals, it's all too easy to drop margins in negotiations. 59% of buyers receive pure price concessions from buyers. This is often because buyers aren't prepared to lead negotiations and respond to common buyer tactics.
When you consider the cumulative impact of lost value across all deals, negotiation skills become essential. Developing your team’s ability to hold firm on value, trade strategically, and lead the negotiation process is critical to maximizing profitability.
Value Generation
The best sales negotiators don’t cave to price pressure. Instead, they hold their ground, focus on value, and negotiate strategically.
When a buyer asks for a price concession, it’s rarely just about price—it’s about value perception, trade-offs, and priorities. Skilled negotiators dig deeper, uncover what truly matters to the buyer, and adjust scope and terms accordingly without eroding margins.
Planning
Negotiation success is won in preparation. Top sales negotiators plan to win by leading discussions, reinforcing value, and staying in control. Use these six strategies:
- Always Be Willing to Walk: Never negotiate from a position of need. Know your alternatives.
- Build Value: Price pressure comes from weak value articulation. Strengthen it.
- Lead the Negotiation: Set the agenda, go first with offers, and stay proactive.
- Effect Emotions: Confidence, tone, and pace influence outcomes. Use them wisely.
- Trade, Don’t Cave: Every give should come with a get to protect deal value.
- Plan to Win: Define your ideal outcome, walkaway point, and trade-offs in advance.
Preparation separates top negotiators from everyone else. Go in ready—and win.
The Importance of Sales Knowledge
You can't sell what you don't know. You need to know your offerings, customers and their context and needs, competitors, the marketplace and industry trends, and much more to be successful.
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Capability Factors by Sales Performance |
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Top Performers score higher in every area we studied. However, no single sales skill or knowledge area was a key driver of top performance.
This is similar to sports. In basketball, dribbling does not make for team wins. Nor does passing, or shooting, or defense, or good coaching. But together in the right mixes, the right skills add up to wins.
Improving the right mix of sales skills across your team will no doubt help you win more business consistently and propel you towards top sales performance.
