AMA: HubSpot Director of Sales, Sarah Mercedes (Osborne) on Sales Soft and Hard Skills

Beyond the obvious things like making sure you have competitive comp and benefits and a great product to sell, these are a couple of other things that come to mind to ensure top talent feels heard and valued, which is critical for retention: Listen & Empathize - Make space to listen to your top performers. This is more than half the battle in my experience. People want to feel heard and valued and this builds trust and loyalty. Skip levels, 1x1s, feedback sessions, ENPS, etc. Respond- Listen ...Read More

The question to ask yourself is what outputs are you looking to influence by sharpening soft skills? The coaching you lean into would be centered around improving the soft skills themselves (i.e. active listening, time management, persuasion, etc.), but the way you'd measure improvements on the soft skills would be based on the outcomes you want to improve via sharpening those soft skills (i.e. conversion rates from discovery to demo stage/what's been uncovered within MEDPIC exiting discovery st ...Read More

Coachability- Those who are open to receiving and giving feedback with the goal of always improving will go farther than those who think they already know it all. Adaptability- In our current environment, the only constant is change. Top sellers understand that this requires them to be ever-evolving. The same playbooks that worked in the past won't yield the same results they once did. Ownership- Sellers who view themselves as the CEO of their own individual book of business and fully responsibl ...Read More

In my opinion, soft skills are harder to teach/coach and typically, if an individual embodies the right soft skills, it is easy to teach them or coach up on the hard skills. For example, resiliency, coachability, and ownership are the three non-negotiable soft skills that my sales leaders are testing for in every interview process. We never waiver on these. Where we have more flex is in the case where candidates who embodies these things may have gaps as it relates to things like demo experience ...Read More

To last long in sales, you must have a growth mindset. A sales career is a constant loop of effort, rejection, learning, improvement, and results. With a growth mindset, you can weather the ups and downs of sales, uncover the learning or opportunity and leverage it to improve your skill set. Without a growth mindset, it is very easy in a sales environment to lose confidence and belief that you can adapt, improve and be capable of accomplishing what you're after. There will be highs and there wil ...Read More

The two that immediately come to mind are discovery and negotiation. Discovery- Being naturally curious, seeking to understand, knowing how to ask 2nd and 3rd layer questions to get to the root of an issue... these skills are relevant and valuable to everyone, both inside and outside of the workplace. You can better understand the perspectives and needs of your teammates, collaborate more effectively, build trust and propose better solutions if you are strong in your discovery abilities. Negotia ...Read More