Episode 35: The Framework On Balancing Hard And Soft Skills
Achieving success is not just all about mastering hard and measurable skills. It must also balance with refining your soft skills. In this episode, Sara Murray takes us further into our growth journey as sales professionals by highlighting the skill set framework. Keep on this path of continued self-development as we learn about the importance of cultivating a well-rounded skill set, whether it's honing your prowess in product knowledge, mastering the art of communication, or embracing the power of emotional intelligence. Tune in to unlock the key to elevating your sales game as Sara helps us see the importance of balancing both hard and soft skills.
---
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The Framework On Balancing Hard And Soft Skills
This is Episode 35 of this show. We are in the middle of August 2023, the middle of Quarter 3. As usual, time is flying by. In the thirty-four episodes leading up to now, I've realized two core themes that keep appearing as a throughline for the show. First, we all, myself included, need to continue to practice, learn, and grow in all areas of life, especially when it comes to our work. If you're taking the time to read, listen, practice, and invest in yourself, whether it's with your money or your time, I would put you in the varsity team category. This is what creates well-rounded individuals. The ability to actively seek and be open to learning new things, hear different perspectives, and refresh our skillset on things we've already learned is what separates the pros from the amateurs.
Varsity players know that practice is what is going to integrate these skills and new learnings into our way of being. You can practice drills all day long, but if you never get out on the field and play the game, what's the point? We want to get in and play the game. Once you're on the field and you start playing, you should be reviewing the tapes, seeing where you could have improved, learning new skills, collaborating with other teammates, and making adjustments for your next game.
In the theme of practicing, the second throughline that keeps appearing is that all of these skills that we discuss on this show weave into and build upon one another. For example, I wanted to create an episode on delivering strong presentations, but so many skills are compiled in that delivery of an impactful presentation, like asking about the business model before you jump right in, using effective storytelling, pulling in demos and sales assets appropriately, and so on and so on. These are all probably sounding familiar because we've gone through the seven crucial skills for effective selling earlier this 2023. There are more than seven skills.
For the duration of the year, we're going to be discussing both hard and soft skills with a little bit more focus. Hard skills are specific capabilities, specific abilities, or skillsets that an individual can possess and demonstrate in a measurable way. These are learnable skills that enable individuals to perform job-specific tasks that may be required for a specific role. Soft skills are personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. These are, as you can imagine, much more difficult to measure and more difficult to just teach. This is where we have continued self-improvement and self-development for soft skills and hard skills.
When I say continued self-development, learning new things, putting them into practice, and then taking an assessment of how it went, finessing and refining to improve upon it for next time is the only way to sharpen these skillsets and essentially level up. It's not just practicing the skill itself, but how both of these skillsets, both hard and soft skills, weave together in this symphony of good business, successful communication, and execution.
I like to think of this as a framework with four parts. 1) Learn. 2) Implement. 3) Reflect. 4) Refine. This framework, learn, implement, reflect, and refine when it comes to our skillsets is going to keep us moving forward in our roles, being more successful in our efforts, and building stronger relationships with others. In my opinion, as we get further along in our careers and more comfortable with our strengths and weaknesses, continued development tends to fall by the wayside. We lean on our strengths. We either don't do our weaknesses, we outsource our weaknesses, or we incorporate those weaknesses as part of our identity. Meaning that we remove any type of accountability or own us on ourselves to work on it.
Here is a quick example here of leaning on a strength and neglecting a weakness. Maybe we're really great at negotiating. Everyone tells us what a master negotiator we are. We're tough. We put on our poker face. We have this hard line in the concrete that we will not pass. We can bully our clients to buy from us because we're sharp negotiators. If we neglect on practicing some of the soft skills, like active listening or adapting to a client's communication style, we may be unintentionally sabotaging ourselves because we are so focused on our hard skill strength. We sabotage ourselves thinking we're a master negotiator. This is a small example, but it hopefully illustrates the point of balancing the two skills. We need both. It's a necessity to look at every type of exchange, interaction, and skills development from this framework of learn, implement, reflect, and refine.
From now until the end of 2023, the goal of these upcoming episodes will be to do a deeper dive into some of these hard and soft skills. My intention is to release a soft skill episode hard skill episode. Sometimes they fall into both and we'll talk about that in this episode, and then, as always, have guest experts come on and help teach us their wisdom and their areas of expertise.
With these four steps, learn, implement, refine, and reflect, this is not a linear process. This is a feedback loop. It's a circle. What I want to do is read through this list of hard skills and soft skills. I want you, reader, to take this time and do a self-assessment on how you feel you land in each of these areas. When I'm doing any type of self-reflection, I usually try to rate myself on a scale of 1 to 5. One, meaning it's an area I'm very uncomfortable with or I'm bad at. Five is an area that I've mastered that skill.
I want you to rank yourself as I'm reading them off. If there are some areas that make you uncomfortable or uneasy, that might be an area for you to focus on and dive deeper into that skillset so we can learn more about it, practice it, reflect on how it went, and then refine it for next time. This is this feedback loop. We're continuing this research and implementation.
I'm going to start with the hard skills. Hard skills can include but are not limited to product knowledge. Having a deep understanding of the products or services we are selling is essential. Those are product features, benefits, and use cases. How do we compare in the market? How do we compare to our competitors? That all falls under the product knowledge bucket.
Communication skills. Clear and persuasive communication is at the core of any successful sales interaction. You should be able to articulate your value proposition and explain complex concepts in simple terms. I find being a good communicator an interesting skillset because I consider this both a hard and a soft skill. With the hard skills, this is about value proposition, complex concepts, etc. On the soft skill side, it is the ability to adapt your communication style to different customer types. Active listening is also crucial to understanding your customers' needs, tailoring your approach accordingly, and not leaving money on the table. We're going to have quite a few episodes around these topics.
Clear and persuasive communication is the core of any successful sales interaction. You should be able to articulate your value proposition and explain complex concepts in simple terms.
Presentation skills. Being confident and a subject matter expert is a huge contributor to your sales success. Presenting skills include more than just a presentation deck. Are you maintaining eye contact? How is your body language coming across? Are you engaging? Are you establishing trust? Are you entertaining? Are you utilizing the seven crucial skills in your presentations and leading your clients where you need them to go?
Negotiation skills. Effective negotiation involves finding common ground and reaching mutually beneficial agreements. It needs us to navigate objections, handle objections, and find win-win solutions that satisfy both parties but also being able to create value while you're preserving your own interests and the interests of your company is key. That is a hard skill. It takes practice.
Time management. Effectively managing your time, juggling multiple leads, business development versus account management, following up, creating meetings, doing the meetings, prioritizing tasks, setting deadlines, and being organized. All of this can help maximize your productivity and achieve your sales targets. Time management is a hard skill.
Also, customer service. We use Customer Relationship Management tools and software, also known as CRM. Using a CRM tool allows you to track leads, manage interactions, monitor your sales pipeline, help you stay organized, and help you follow up. It helps set expectations and sales goals. Practicing and learning a CRM takes effort.
Project management, that's another one, budgeting and forecasting, creating sales quotas, managing a team, and being an effective leader. All of these fall into the hard skills category. As you can see, we can't just focus on the hard skills because they all include a balance of the soft skills. Getting into the soft skills, these are areas that can be more difficult to quantify and, in many ways, more difficult to learn. I would argue that they're more important than hard skills because most people can learn to use CRM software. If empathy doesn't come natural to you, it's going to take more effort to learn, implement, reflect, and refine. That's why it's important to do this work.
Soft skills are more important than hard skills because most people can learn to use CRM software but if empathy doesn't come naturally to you, it's going to take more effort to learn, implement, reflect, and refine.
Examples of soft skills would be empathy. Enabling people to connect with our customers on a deeper level, understanding our emotions, tailoring our approaches to meet specific needs, and building trust and rapport, all fall into this empathy skill. Active listening is a major soft skill. It's when we're going to dedicate an entire episode because it is so crucial. Adaptability is the ability to be flexible. How do you handle a dramatic change of plans? How nimble are you of a client or a manager who throws you a curve ball? Do you get upset? Are you focused on where you originally wanted to go and now you have to go down this other course? Being adaptable is important.
Resilience is a huge soft skill. How do you respond when the door is slamming in your face all day long? How do you view rejection? If you keep running into roadblocks, do you crumble and give up? Do you pick yourself up? Do you keep going? Do you pivot? This is where we need to really practice, implement, refine and reflect. This is how it's going to be easier to handle mistakes because we're taking action knowing we're going to learn from the mistake and get better on the other side of it. This is a soft skill, but it's learnable.
Problem-solving is another big one. How do you approach problems? Are you someone who pulls yourself up by the bootstraps and figures it out? If a teammate or client comes to you with a problem, do you help them? Can you point them in the right direction, if you can't? How resourceful are you? Resourcefulness is something that's hard to quantify and difficult to teach but it's something we can practice, if we're rating ourselves low here. Problem-solving is something that's a wonderful asset to have and is always required in a sales role.
Also, the ability to influence, whether it's a customer we're trying to influence or an internal stakeholder that we need to influence. Even more of a soft skill to master is the ability to influence without authority. That's going to be a dedicated episode and I'm looking forward to that one. Confidence is a huge soft skill. It's wildly important. This is a great example of practicing it, reflecting, and refining it. The only way to build confidence is to get better at all these skills.
We talk about relationship building a lot on this show. If you have a strong relationship, then the harder skills you need to implement become “less hard” now because we already have an established relationship. Negotiating doesn't need to be so tough-faced if that relationship infrastructure is already there. Working with a team. How well do we collaborate with others? Networking and business development. How do we approach it? Cultural sensitivity, integrity and ethics, emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and effectively use our own emotions as well as the emotions of others. This is a combination of self-awareness, self-regulation, and interpersonal skills. It ties into how we make decisions and how we manage our stress. Emotional intelligence is a significantly important soft skill.
These are not an all-encompass list. If you didn’t rate yourself a 4 or 5 on all of these, that's not a problem. I certainly didn't. There are many skills that I'm working on, learning, and finessing. The only way to master a skill is to put it into practice. We must take action. Balancing hard and soft skills is essential for becoming a well-rounded and effective professional. Remember that finding this balance is an ongoing process. Prioritize continuous improvement, be open to feedback, and maintain a growth mindset.
What separates the pros from the amateurs and what makes us a varsity team is the ability to learn, implement, reflect, and refine. I am excited to get into some of these in more detail. We're going to dive deep into some of these hard and soft skills. We have great guests coming up to support us in these efforts as well. I know it's going to serve you. I'm learning a lot as we go through it and build and practice because this is how we grow.
I want to thank you for reading this. If you'd like to stay up-to-date on the latest from me, please head to Connect.SaraMurray.com and we'll get you on our list. I have some fun things cooking and would love to be able to share them with you. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, leave a review, and share with a friend. Thanks so much for reading. I'll see you next episode.
