​“Always be helping is the new always be closing”. In 2009, I coined this phrase during some long-winded, long-forgotten webinar on how the internet was changing consumer behavior. It was a pithy attempt to explain how companies would need to adapt their sales and marketing efforts in a world where the buyer was clearly in control.

A recent search for the phrase “always be helping” shows that a number of really smart marketers have jumped on the bandwagon, using it as a battle cry for a new way to engage customers. It’s validation of a powerful concept, but thus far, always be helping (or ABH) has been just that – nothing more than a concept. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to explore how sales and marketing can put the concept of always be helping into practice.

​The sales profession is undergoing some pretty radical changes. The buyer is in charge, field sales is moving inside, technology is transforming the profession. It’s so bad that some people are predicting that 15M sales jobs will disappear in the coming years. To survive in this environment, salespeople need a new set of  skills. We’ve identified a core set of 18 sales skills by analyzing these trends and watching what makes some of the world’s best salespeople successful in the new sales environment. The best salespeople:

1. Understand what the buyer wants
2. Sell in a buyer-responsive manner
3. Use psychology to engage the buyer
4. Establish trust with the buyer
5. Communicate succinctly
6. Act on what the customer is saying
7. Demonstrate subject matter expertise
8. Help (as opposed to close) their prospects
9. Tell really compelling stories

The best sales teams are a lot like great schools: They care about results, but the way they achieve them is by being relentless about developing the inside sales skills of their reps. In fact, the best sales teams are most often led by someone who is more like a sales coach than a sales manager. This dedication to developing inside sales skills ultimately creates a sales team that not only hits its short-term goals, but instills a culture of learning and self-improvement in order to achieve its long-term goals as well.

But it’s not always so easy. Superb inside sales skills don’t always come naturally to young reps, and sales leaders often feel like they don’t have the time or mastery to adequately coach their reps. We know how important this process is, though, so we boiled everything down to the 14 inside sales skills every sales rep must master