ELAvate has partnered with Senior Consultant Abhilash Sivaraman and CEO Michael Griffin to launch a bi-weekly podcast series, "Selling in Asia." This lively visual and audio discussion will focus on sales success for salespeople and managers, drawing on Abhilash's 20+ years of global sales experience and Michael's 30+ years in sales productivity consulting in Asia. This series complements our existing Sales e-zines and blogs.

In my previous blog on “Sales Plasticity” I highlighted how ability & adaptability lead to agility. The “high octane” fuel for having super sales agility is “resilience.” I learned this in the mid-80s in Malaysia as a road race cyclist under the guidance of the National Cycling Coach Ng Joo Ngan. He is a master coach who motivates his cyclists to win races with agility & resilience. Over the past 40 years as National Coach, he has coached Malaysian cyclists to 59 gold medals in international events.

Jeffrey Gitomer says “If you can’t ask good questions, you will never be successful in sales!” Salespeople need not be just good talkers, but good communicators. This means their ability to ask good insightful, relevant questions to listen to the customer is crucial. Most companies train salespeople in product knowledge and basic selling skills but brush over their ability to ask questions/ probes in a structured way to fully understand customer problems, and needs that link to your solutions.

The advent of hybrid selling has led to many blogs and articles on the supposedly new skills of a B2B salesperson in the post Covid marketplace. Let’s review the attitudes or attributes of successful B2B salespeople in this new era.

B2B selling skills really do still make a difference when buttressed by the key attitudes found in this blog. My advice: Hire and promote people for these B2B selling attitudes and train them in B2B selling skills.

Clarity through Covid is crucial in our B2B marketplace. A recent study by Tamara Schenk of Showpad is telling on the difficulty of closing B2B deals: