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Originally Posted On: https://blog.perenso.com/essential-b2b-skills-sales-reps-need-in-2023

Sales teams who embrace innovative best practices for B2B sales techniques and add them to their skillset will have a leg up on competitors who just stick to what’s worked in the past. The industry is constantly changing, and sellers must be ready to adopt new tactics to meet those changes head-on. Here are the two most essential B2B skills every sales rep will need in 2023.

Using Data to Conduct Sales

In the old days, sales reps didn’t have hard data to guide their decision making process. They had to rely on intuition, gut instinct, and pure luck to generate leads and close deals. But the B2B sales landscape runs on data these days. With refined analytics data, sales teams can track their performance and identify which goals have been reached and what factors contributed to their success. Teams can also evaluate areas of improvement for sales goals that weren’t met.

B2B sales data can help you generate and qualify leads, as well as understand your target buyers’ pain points and where they are in the buyer’s journey. With that knowledge, you can refine your sales strategy to meet customer needs. By leveraging data, you can stay current with business trends in your industry and take advantage of sales opportunities at the right time.

This is why it’s so important for B2B sales reps to know how to leverage data and analytics. A solid foundation of key metrics and proficiency with sales enablement tools will help sales reps find success in 2023.

Developing Soft Skills to Connect With Customers

While soft skills have always been an integral part of a sales rep’s necessary skill set, they’re especially important to have in 2023. In a post-pandemic world, people are starting to crave personal interaction again. Potential customers will be more likely to gravitate toward sales teams that haven’t forgotten how to add the human touch to their day-to-day dealings with them. Sales is a people business first and foremost. Two soft skills that are vital for a sales rep to have are empathy and communication.

Empathy

The ability to understand how other people feel is a skill that comes naturally to some people more than others. It massively helps B2B sales reps connect with their customers. Putting yourself in their shoes, imagining what their pain points are and what obstacles they may be facing, can help you create a solution or find a product that best suits their needs. Sharpening your empathy skills comes down to talking with other people and imagining yourself in their position.

Communication

It’s not uncommon to mistake being a good talker for being a good communicator. But there’s so much more to communication than just being able to talk endlessly about something. It’s also about being able to listen and interpret what’s being said and then to act on it. Good communicators consider what the other person is saying rather than simply waiting for their turn to talk.

Good communicators will also change their tone and word choice depending on who they’re talking to. For B2B sales, that means changing your approach toward each business that is a potential customer.

Enhanced Efficiency With the Perenso Field Sales Solution

As the B2B sales landscape becomes increasingly more digital, sales reps need to bolster their technical proficiency. Soft skills alone won’t be enough to deliver an effective sales pitch and close a deal. B2B sales teams need to take advantage of sales enablement tools to streamline the process of analyzing data, generating useful reports, and improve their performance.

The right sales enablement tool can streamline your B2B sales processes with automation, provide up-to-date analytics & reporting, and provide all your relevant sales content in a single platform.

Ready to take your B2B sales team to the next level and get the most out of 2023?