Number four on the list of necessary qualities is the ABILITY TO BUILD POSITIVE BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS. Sales is, more than anything else, the activity of developing relationships with quantities of people which result in those people trusting the salesperson, feeling positive feelings about him/her, and believing the things he/she says.

So, the successful salesperson is the individual who can quickly build trusting relationships with all sorts of people. That requires empathy, the ability to listen, perceptiveness, and the ability to mold himself/herself into the kind of person the prospect needs.Those are relationship-building skills. And the most successful salespeople are relationship builders.

I often have eliminated prospective salespeople during an interview when they interrupted me too many times, or weren’t sensitive to what I was communicating to them during the interview. If they weren’t good at building a relationship with me, they certainly were not going to be able to build relationships with customers.

A side thought — many of the most successful salespeople I have known have had negative personal relationships. Sometimes salespeople can readily build business relationships which turn into friendships, but are unable to build strong relationships in their personal lives. On the other hand, some people who have very strong personal relationships with their spouses, children, and friends, are unable or unwilling to build good business relationships. The characteristic that defines a superstar salesperson is the specific ability to build good business relationships.

Your job, as a prospective employer, is to find that ability to build those kind of relationships — to build trust, to have people feel that the salesperson is personally interested in them, to have people believe in them and in what they’re saying. That is one of the abilities which sets apart the mediocre from the great salespeople.

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We will continue this discussion next week as we discover the next Quality of a SuperStar Salesperson.