This past Monday, three other students and I had the opportunity to attend the Buffalo Niagara Sales & Marketing Executives Student Day. Kourtney Shearer, Danielle Board, Taylor Tracy, and myself attended a day long conference, which included a choice of one of three tours, a special presentation by Bill Knoche, a networking opportunity, and a dinner presentation with Marc Adler. As I previously stated in my last blog post, I have decided to split the blog post into three separate posts and this is the second part in the three part series.

After our tour at  FB Displays & Designs, Inc., we traveled to the Hyatt Regency in Buffalo to take part in our late afternoon and evening activities. Our late afternoon plans was a special presentation by Bill Knoche. Mr. Knoche’s presentation was on soft skills. Soft skills are personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. Communication was the soft skill that Bill’s presentation focused on. The presentation was insightful and offered many useful tips to be the best salesperson you can be.

Growing up your experiences effect your soft skills, most specifically your communication skills and here are some useful tips about how to build your soft skills that we learned from Bill’s presentation:

• Sales presentations tend to be one sided and that is why communicating with the customer is very important.
• Start to understand your buyer in order to build a relationship.
• Conversation is key.
• Life is little pieces of selling.
• Breakdown walls.
• Engage people.
• Understand people.
• Understand the question.
• Understand the process.
• Stretch the truth.
• Give the customer opportunities.