Top 15 Tasks of a Salesperson

To become a successful salesperson, you need to manage lots of essential tasks. The more you strategically and technically manage those tasks, the more you will become an expert day by day.

In this article, we are going to discuss 15 major tasks that a sales representative must do. Some of the common tasks of a salesperson are –

• Qualifying reliable leads for long-term growth.
• Handling customer objections strategically.
• Regularly following up with the prospects.
• Building and nurturing a relationship with the customer.
• Achieving sales targets and quotes.

So let’s explore them properly, get a complete idea about the relevant tasks of becoming a salesperson.

15 Major Tasks a Salesperson Should Do

The main goal of a salesperson is to sell products and services to the right customers. For this purpose, the sales personnel should do multiple types of tasks to make the sales process more efficient. In this part, we will discuss 15 major tasks that a salesperson often does.

1. Prospecting: Finding Potential Customers

For finding potential customers, a virtual salesperson has to be skilled in different factors like researching, targeted outreach, and strong networking ability. It can be considered the initial or major tasks of a salesperson.

So, sales prospecting becomes an integral part of the growth of your overall business. Because of the prospective data, you will have to create a proper sales pipeline for the business.

There are different types of methods that are often used for sales prospecting. Now, we will discuss some of the commonly used methods.

• Cold Calling – Salespeople contact potential customers through cold calling who haven’t shown interest in purchasing products or services yet.
• Email Outreach – Through email management & outreach, salespeople send customized emails to the prospects about products and services.
• LinkedIn – LinkedIn helps salespeople to connect, identify, and analyze potential customers more effectively.
• Referrals – It’s one of the great ways to connect with new prospects with the help of existing customers.

These are some of the common tools that are often used in prospecting: Salesforce – Sales Engagement platform,  HubSpot Sales Hub, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Salessoft(AI-based), etc.

2. Qualifying Leads

To identify the sales-qualified leads, you have to target those leads who are already interested in your product and service type. For understanding, you have to analyze their web activities, interactions, financial resources, and authority.

Here, the Ideal Customer Profile(ICP) is also a very essential factor. It will give you a complete idea about that sales prospect.

Now, will give some idea about multiple types of sales analysis frameworks –

• BANT – BANT is a powerful formula that determines the customer’s budget, authority to purchase, demands, pain points, and decision-making timeline.
• CHAMP – In this formula, sales representatives qualify leads based on challenges, authority, money, and prioritization.
• MEDDIC – It’s a qualification process of high-quality leads based on metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identifying pain, and champion.

In terms of qualifying the leads, time management is one of the huge factors. As an expert salesperson, you have to use the techniques on those potential leads who are already interested in purchasing your product.

3. Conducting Product/Service Presentations

One of the primary responsibilities of a salesperson is getting in front of a prospect and telling a compelling story about how their product or service meets the needs of that prospect.

This is one method to prime interest and prepare for further engagement. Excellent sales presentations don’t simply demo features rather, they demonstrate how these features address real problems.

If you are offering software, services, or products, a compelling presentation inspires confidence and trust in your solution.

How Salespeople Deliver Effective Presentations:

• Adapt presentations to meet particular client needs
• Avoid one-size-fits-all presentations. Get to know the client’s industry, needs, and objectives before you show up to the talk.
• Decide on the format, such as In-person or virtual.
• Reserve in-person meetings for building relationships and leverage virtual tools (e.g., Zoom, MS Teams) when meeting remotely.
• Also, you can easily create demos, videos about your products and services, and represent them to the target customers.

4. Handling Objections

As a salesperson, you have to carefully handle customer objections. When you are dealing with the sales of products, customers might have lots of questions, objections, and queries.

Most of the customers’ objections are related to the product prices, trustworthiness, and their matching with their needs. So, solving their doubts related to these issues is important for selling the product and services in the right way.

These are some of the common techniques for managing objections.

• Feel-Felt-Found – You have to assure the customers that the product prices are comparable to the core perks of this product. So the cost will be justified. Also, acknowledge the budget concerns of the customers.
• Empathy – Showing empathy is another technique. You have to ask about the previous experience of the customers regarding using the products. Also, it’s necessary to understand the current situation of the customers.
• Offerings – You need to provide them with testimonials, data, and relevant documents about your products and services to your customers.

Objection handling is crucial for closing the final deals with the customers. Properly addressing the customers’ issues and solving those issues strategically is necessary.

5. Closing Deals

Effective deal closing is crucial for a salesperson. Because it’s the final stage for turning the potential customer into a permanent customer, to properly close the deal, you must apply some essential techniques. Some of the common techniques are –

• Assumptive Close – In this technique, you have to assume that the prospect is ready to purchase. Here, the logistics, delivery, and payment systems are important.
• Urgency Close – In urgency close, you can offer some specific discounts or perks regarding your products and services. Or it can be a limited-time discount for the targeted customer.
• Soft Close – Soft closing process is a more gentle approach to the customer’s buying decision based on the benefits of the products and the customer’s goals.

Understanding the buying signals of the customers and accurate timing is another concerning part for deal closing. Always prioritize the buying signals according to the positive and negative manner.

Some customers show you the positive signals that they exactly need your products. But in some cases, customers’ objections and pain points regarding products are considerable. So, timely following up and encouraging them to make the decision is important.

6. Following Up with Prospects

For the B2B and B2C sales cycle, following up with the prospects is a highly important task for a salesperson.

Because a proper follow-up process helps in different ways, such as building a strong relationship with the customers, improving your conversion rate, nurturing leads, etc. But there are some differences between B2B and B2C follow-up processes.

• B2B – B2B follow-up process more strategically focuses on building strong and long-term relationships with customers.
• B2C – B2C follow-up process focuses more on the urgency of closing deals. This means an emphasis on the purchase rate decision of the potential customers.

Let’s explore some best practices that you should follow in the follow-up process with the prospects.

• Timing – You can focus on different timeframes for the follow-up, such as 24-48 hours, 2-3 days, and 3-5 days.
• Content – In terms of follow-up content, you must emphasize the factors like a customized approach, a value proposition, and a clear call to action.
• Tone – The follow-up tone should be respectful, helpful, and persistent with the customers.

7. Building and Nurturing Relationships

As a salesperson, building and nurturing relationships with customers is necessary. It determines the long-term success and brand identity for any type of business.

To ensure a strong relationship, some of the factors are highly important, such as consistent communication with the customers, providing essential support regarding products and services, etc.

• Trustworthiness in Long Term – For successful sales, building long-term trust is highly important. The long-term trust is built up through proper communication and collaboration with the customers, and understanding their pain points.
• Post-Sale Communication and Service – Ensuring the credibility, post-sales communication, and support is essential. You can ask the customers if they are facing any issues, and offer reliable solutions for that.

With the help of CRM tools, you can easily maintain personalized conversations with individual customers. You can schedule emails according to the specific customer’s demands, automate follow-up reminders to the customers, create customized documents for them, etc.

8. Achieving Sales Targets & Quotas

Proper understanding of sales targets and quotas is an important duty for the salesperson. Your organization will set up key performance indicators(KPI) for you. Also, you will get the KPI based commission according to the policy.

So, your first duty is to clarify how you can optimize your performance based on the demand. There are some motivation and goal factors that will help you to achieve sales targets and quotas.

• SMART Goals – Analyze your sales goals based on these factors, such as specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Consistent Feedback and Coaching – You have to look for regular feedback and essential instructions from the authority. This will help you to achieve and track your targets more effectively.
• Regular Goal Tracking – Consistent goal tracking is always better for understanding how much you are progressing. Also, it will determine the necessary improvements that you should make to achieve the goal.

For achieving the sales targets and quotes, you can go for creating a weekly or monthly planning strategy. The most effective way to follow is the weekly method. For example, tracking the weekly progress and building a plan for how much you should go in a single week.

9. Reporting and Documentation

To maintain the accuracy of the sales forecasting, effective reporting and documenting are significant factors. Here, you can input your sales progression-related data on CRM tools and the sales dashboard on a regular basis.

This will save a significant amount of time and ensure data transparency. Also, lots of salespeople use Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel to save the data for the monthly reporting process.

Here are some reasons why the documentation matters for sales forecasting.

• Ensure Data Transparency – When you collect and present the data in a documented way, it will automatically show the transparency of the data.
• Better for the Decision Making – In terms of the decision-making process, this data will help in improving the overall sales cycle. Your team will be able to understand the overall effort and performance of sales.
• Improve the Forecasting Structure – A well-structured database is always good for maintaining clarity and tracking progress easily. It will be helpful for better resource allocation and process, and creating a strategic plan for sales.

10. Staying Updated on Industry and Product Knowledge

To become a successful salesperson, you must be updated on industry knowledge. Also, you should have a proper idea about the products and services that you are working with.

Otherwise, it’s impossible to reach the right potential customers and attract them to purchase the products from you. So, here the continuous learning process is essential about your relevant industry and products.

For example, you can join different webinars and read current trade news related to your industry. Let’s assume you are working as a SaaS sales representative.

Now you can connect with the famous SaaS companies’ sales heads and researchers, who are working in the same industry. They often arrange webinars and podcasts and discuss how the industry is running, what the current trends are.

This will help you remain on a continuous learning curve and get updated knowledge about your industry.

11. Collaborating with Marketing Teams

When you are working as a salesperson, you must collaborate with the marketing team. It’s one of the powerful methods to improve the sales strategy to get the best result.

This effective collaboration will help you create a strategic approach for reaching out to the target customers. Another good factor will come up that through insights sharing and collaborations, there is growth alignment.

• Alignment of Ideal Customer Profile – To determine the ideal customer profiles, such as customer demographics, interests, demands, and pain points, the sales and marketing teams should be aligned.
• Sharing Feedback and Campaign Results – Sales team can easily share the various sales insights, such as customers’ pain points, which content is working well, etc, with the marketing team. Also, the marketing team can share their marketing campaign results. So this insight share is highly beneficial for the overall growth.

In terms of collaboration, the sales enablement content is highly important. Some of the common types of sales enablement content are case studies, sales scripts, product brochures, etc.

So these contents have accurate and sufficient data about the overall growth rate and conversion rate of the entire business. As a result, marketing and sales can go for a more actionable plan.

12. Managing the Sales Pipeline

The core task of a salesperson is to manage the sales pipeline for the business. The sales pipeline will help you to understand which steps are followed by the customers for making the final purchase decision.

When you have complete knowledge about the sales pipeline, you can easily identify the bottlenecks, improve sales efforts, and create an effective strategy for conversion rate.

Well, the sales pipeline goes through some essential factors.

• Awareness – First, you have to clarify that the potential customers are aware of your products and services.
• Interest – When you successfully create awareness among the customers. They will get interested in knowing your product and services. In this situation, you have to provide more detailed and helpful information to them.
• Decision – Now the customers already know about your products and services, and their core benefits are to them. This is the crucial part of the sales pipeline because customers are ready to make the purchasing decision. Here, effective communication with them is very essential.
• Purchase – When all the criteria of your products and services match with the customers’ demands and requirements, they will take the final decision to purchase.

With the help of tools like Pipedrive, Freshsales, Keap, and Insightly, you can easily visualize the sales pipeline with reporting and analytical data.

13. Attending Networking Events & Trade Shows

Strong networking is always important for becoming successful as a salesperson. Your first priority is to build face-to-face connections with the relevant field experts, who might be sales executives, marketers, owners, etc.

It creates trustworthiness and reliability in the market. For this purpose, you can attend different types of networking events. There are lots of sales-related events arranged around the world, such as SaaStr Annual, Dreamforce, Sales Success Summit, Gartner Sales Conference, Sales Innovation Expo, etc.

Through the trustworthy connections, you can easily generate inbound leads. Here, you have to strategically focus on attracting customers through multiple types of marketing methods.

Target those customers who are already interested in your company and products. So this targeted marketing approach will help you to get more leads by combining marketing and connection.

The overall impacts of networking create strong brand visibility among the target audiences and customers.

14. Upselling and Cross-Selling

Using the upselling and cross-selling methods is another powerful technique that is often used by salespeople.

The main goal of this technique is to increase customer value and encourage them to purchase complementary and expensive products and services.

• Upselling – In the upselling process, you have to offer the more upgraded and premium version of the products. Here, one thing you have to remember is that you need to target those customers who are already interested in the type of product that you are offering them. The core goal of upselling is to increase the average order value(AOV).
• Cross-selling – In the cross-selling process, you have to promote complementary products to the customers along with the main products. It increases the attraction of the customers to those specific products. When you visit a single product page, you will see related products in the recommendations section.

But, in upselling process some of the sales team use aggressive sales technique for the upselling process. So that practice is not good for your sales cycle. You have to focus on the ethical upselling process. Otherwise, the customer will lose interest.

Timing is the biggest factor in becoming successful in these methods. The best time is after the immediate purchase by the customers. That time, you easily recommended other related products or the premium version of the products.

15. Continuous Improvement & Feedback Integration

After-sales improvement and feedback are always necessary. When you have proper feedback data, you can easily use it for further improvement of your product and services.

As a result, your products will be more user-friendly and matched with your customers’ needs. There are different types of methods available for collecting feedback from customers.

• You can easily collect feedback from multiple channels such as user interviews, surveys, customer reviews, forms, etc.
• You can also take real-time and individualized feedback from the customers. For example, you can ask for a review or user experience immediately after purchasing the product.
• Gather different types of data from the feedback, such as customers’ pain points, positive factors about products, mostly faced issues, feature recommendations, etc.

When you collect all the data, prioritize it based on different categories. It will help you to analyze them according to their purposes.

Final Words

Is it easy to become a salesperson in the current time? Well, the answer is yes. But you should have a strong knowledge of how the sales process works because there are lots of tasks and duties involved.

So efficiently managing those tasks might become a hassle for you if you don’t have enough knowledge about the industry and the whole selling process. In this article, we have talked about 15 tasks that must be done by any salesperson, such as prospect identification, service presentation, closing deals, handling objections, etc.