The old sales tactics taught and used by many salespeople in the past will not work in the new economy.

If you're going to succeed in sales during the current economic situation and in the coming three to five years, you're going to have to adapt a new way of selling.

These skills are not new to the top sales people. They are the same skills I learned and mastered. The same skills that took me from barely paying my bills back in the early eighties to a six figure income in a matter a three months.

The top sales people in the new economy will have five key skills:

* Empathy with their client

* Long-term relationship-building skills

* The ability to work with people in other departments of their company

* In-depth knowledge of the market

* A dedication to customer service

Let's dive in and look at each one in-depth:

The sales people who will succeed have empathy with their client.

The dictionary defines empathy as; the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

In layman's terms, it means you need to be able to put yourself in your clients shoes. You need to look at things through their eyes, feel how their feeling and genuinely care about what's important to them, putting your own ideas and feelings about what's right for them aside.

There's an old saying, people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. So get yourself out of the way and start genuinely caring about what your clients are saying and what their not saying to you.

The sales people who succeed will have long term relationship building skills.

Many sales people and companies for that matter spend more time and money getting a client than they do to keep them. That is so backwards. From the time you first make contact with a client you should thinking long term relationship. Once a client has purchased from you and they like and trust you, they are more apt to purchase more from you and to become ambassadors for you.

When you develop the kind of long term, friendly relationship with your client and they are singing your praises to everyone they know, the business of sales gets so much easier.

As you may already know, it's a great feeling when the phone rings and it's a current client calling to give you a referral or better yet it's the referral calling you want to make a purchase.

The sales people who succeed will have the ability to work with people in other departments of their company.

You need to have good working relationships with all departments of your company. Remember, your all in this together working towards one common goal, to make the client happy so the company turns a profit. People in other departments are not the enemy as many sales people treat them.

You never know when you might need a favor; a faster delivery, so extras added to the purchase, some one to work a little late to get your order out, who knows what you might need from another person in your company some day.

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