To be a good salesperson, learn the buyer's problem before you talk about your product, and keep a short list of habits every day: prepare for each call, ask more than you tell, follow up when you said you would and review your own calls. Those habits matter more than charm, and anyone willing to practice them can build them.
This guide covers what makes a good salesperson, a checklist of daily and weekly habits, the qualifications and expectations of the job, what consultative selling means and how salespeople are paid. For the moves you use inside each conversation, see our guide to sales techniques.
What makes a good salesperson?
A good salesperson helps buyers make a decision they feel good about later. In practice, that means they understand the buyer's situation, show only what solves it, tell the truth about what the product can't do and keep the deal moving with clear next steps.
The bar has gone up because buyers can learn a lot without a seller. In a 2026 Gartner survey, 67% of B2B buyers said they prefer a buying experience without a seller. When a buyer does agree to a call, they expect to get something the website couldn't give them: a sharper view of their problem, an honest answer about fit, or a plan to get the purchase approved.
Here is what that looks like on a call:
| Trait | What you hear on a good call |
|---|---|
| Curious | Open questions about the buyer's goals and problems, with follow-ups that go one level deeper |
| A good listener | The buyer talks for long stretches, and the seller repeats their words back before answering |
| Prepared | The seller mentions something specific about the buyer's company in the first minutes |
| Honest | "We're not a fit for that part" when it's true, said early |
| Clear | Short explanations tied to what the buyer said, with no jargon |
| Persistent | A follow-up on the day promised, and another when the buyer goes quiet |
| Organized | Every call ends with a date, an owner and an action |
| Coachable | The seller asks for feedback on a specific moment and tries the change on the next call |
Being loud, a natural talker or able to "sell ice to anyone" is not on the list. Many good salespeople are quiet. Our guide to sales for introverts covers how listening and preparation work in their favor.
What habits do good salespeople have?
Good salespeople repeat a small set of habits before every call, every day and every week. None of them is hard. What separates good sellers is that they keep doing them on the busy weeks, too.
Before every call
- Read the last notes and the CRM record
- Look up each person who will join
- Write the goal of the call in one line
- Prepare three open questions
Every day
- Protect a block of time for calls
- Send recaps and follow-ups the same day
- Update the CRM right after each call
- Add new contacts to the pipeline
Every week
- Listen back to one of your calls
- Review every open deal and its next step
- Practice one skill, out loud
- Ask for feedback on one moment
Before every call
Spend ten minutes preparing. Read the notes from the last conversation, look up each person who accepted the invite and write the goal of the call in one line: "Find out who signs off on budget" is a goal. "Discovery" is not. Then write three open questions you want answered. Buyers notice when you remember what they said last time, and they notice when you don't.
Every day
Protect a block of time for calls, usually in the morning before meetings and email take over. Send the recap and any follow-up the same day as the call, while both of you remember the details. Update the CRM right after each call, in two or three lines. And add new contacts to your pipeline every day, even on busy days, because the pipeline you build this week is the revenue you close next quarter.
Time is the habit most people lose first. Salesforce's State of Sales report (7th edition, 2026) found that sellers spend 40% of their week selling and 60% on other work. Our guide to sales productivity covers how to win some of those hours back.
Every week
Listen back to one of your own calls, ideally the one where the buyer pushed back. Review every open deal and check that each has a dated next step. Pick one skill to practice and say the words out loud a few times before you use them on a call. Then ask your manager or a peer for feedback on one specific moment, not on the whole call.
For more on building routines around these habits, watch the session habits: what you do on the daily, which covers morning and evening routines and how to track them.
What qualifications does a salesperson need?
Most sales jobs don't require a specific degree. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that for many sales roles a high school diploma is generally enough, while sellers of scientific or technical products typically need at least a bachelor's degree. The same page lists the qualities that matter: customer service skills, interpersonal skills and self-confidence.
What you need to show depends on the role:
| Role | What hiring managers want to see | How to show it |
|---|---|---|
| Sales development representative (SDR) | You handle rejection, learn fast and communicate clearly in writing | A short, specific outreach email to the hiring manager |
| Account executive | You can run discovery and a demo, and you have hit a target before | A mock discovery call and numbers from your last role |
| Senior or enterprise account executive | You have closed large deals with many people involved | One deal told step by step: who was involved, what stalled, how it closed |
| Technical or specialized sales | You understand the buyer's field | A degree or work experience in that field |
If you are moving into sales from another job, look at what you already do that counts: running client conversations, persuading a team to change a process, recovering an unhappy customer. Our guide on how to learn sales has a plan for getting your first role, with or without sales experience.
What is expected of a salesperson?
A salesperson is expected to reach a revenue target, keep enough pipeline to reach the next one and keep the team informed about where each deal stands. The target gets the attention, but managers judge the other parts every week.
| Expectation | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Hit the target | Close the revenue or meetings in your quota, most quarters |
| Build pipeline | Enough open deals to cover next quarter's target, created by you, not only by marketing |
| Forecast honestly | Say which deals will close this month, and be right most of the time |
| Keep records current | Notes, next steps and deal stages up to date after every call |
| Represent the company well | Promise only what the product does, and hand over cleanly to the team that onboards the customer |
| Keep improving | Work on one skill at a time and ask for feedback |
Targets are hard to hit. In Salesforce's 2024 State of Sales survey, 67% of sellers said they did not expect to hit their quota that year. That is why the other expectations matter. A seller who misses a quarter but has an honest forecast, a full pipeline and a skill they are clearly improving is in a much better spot than one who missed with no warning. Our guide to sales goals shows how to pair the target with activity and skill goals you control.
How do good salespeople handle rejection?
Good salespeople expect most answers to be no, and they treat each no as information about the deal, the timing or their own approach. Rejection is part of the job at every level: an SDR hears it on most cold calls, and an account executive loses deals they worked on for months.
What helps, from the first cold call to the lost deal:
| Situation | What a good salesperson does |
|---|---|
| A no on a cold call | Asks one question before hanging up: "Is it the timing, or is this not a problem for you?" |
| A buyer who goes quiet | Sends one short message with a reason to reply, then a final one that makes it easy to say no |
| A lost deal | Asks the buyer what decided it, writes the reason in the CRM and sets a date to check back |
| A bad week | Looks at the activity they control (calls made, meetings held) before judging the results |
Asking why you lost turns rejection into something you can use. Many buyers will answer a short, honest question like "What would have made us the right choice?" Over a quarter, those answers show patterns: the same competitor, the same missing feature, the same stage where deals stall. That tells you which skill to work on next.
Lost deals also come back. A buyer who chose a competitor or waited a year may be ready again when their situation changes. Our guide to closed-lost reactivation covers when and how to reach out again.
For the early, cold-call side of rejection, the session building cold call confidence covers how SDRs keep going after a run of noes.
What is consultative selling?
Consultative selling is an approach where the seller acts as an advisor: they diagnose the buyer's problem with questions first, then recommend a solution that fits, even when that means a smaller deal or no deal. Most good B2B salespeople sell this way, because B2B buyers have complex problems and many people to convince.
Pitch-first selling
The seller leads with the product:
- Opens with a company overview and a demo
- Talks about every feature
- Treats objections as obstacles to push past
- Measures the call by how much was presented
Consultative selling
The seller leads with the buyer:
- Opens by asking about the buyer's goals
- Shows only the parts that solve what they heard
- Treats objections as information to understand
- Measures the call by what the seller learned and the next step agreed
An example: a seller at Corvane, a scheduling software company, is talking to the operations lead at Brightline Dental. A pitch-first call opens with the feature list. A consultative call opens with "Walk me through what happens when a patient cancels the same day," finds out that empty chairs cost each clinic about $1,200 a week, and then shows only the waitlist feature that fills those slots.
Consultative selling sits close to needs-based selling, which builds the whole sale around the buyer's stated needs, and relationship selling, which focuses on trust over a long account. For simple, low-price purchases, a faster transactional approach often fits better.
What are some examples of sales skills?
Sales skills are the abilities a seller uses on calls and across deals. Ten that cover most B2B sales:
- Listening and building rapport
- Discovery: finding the problem and what it costs
- Presenting a solution tied to what the buyer said
- Talking about price
- Handling objections
- Creating urgency
- Selling to executives
- Negotiating
- Setting next steps
- Winning back lost deals
Habits and skills work together. The habits in the checklist above give you the time and the preparation. The skills decide what happens once the call starts. Our guide to sales skills covers each of these ten, with how to train it and how to check it on a call.
How are salespeople paid?
Most salespeople earn a base salary plus variable pay. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that most employers combine salary with commissions or bonuses. A commission is a share of what you sell. A bonus is paid for hitting a target, and it can depend on your own results, your team's or the company's.
The common terms:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Base salary | The fixed part of pay, paid whatever you sell |
| Commission | A percentage of the revenue you close |
| Bonus | A fixed amount for hitting a target |
| OTE (on-target earnings) | Base plus variable pay if you hit 100% of your target |
| Accelerator | A higher commission rate on revenue above your target |
| Ramp | A lower target for new hires in their first months |
A worked example with fictional numbers: an account executive at Northwind has an OTE of $150,000, made up of a $75,000 base and $75,000 in commission, on a yearly target of $750,000 in new revenue. That is a 10% commission rate. If they close $900,000, they earn 10% on the first $750,000 and an accelerated 15% on the $150,000 above it. That is $97,500 in commission ($75,000 plus $22,500) and $172,500 in total with the base.
Pay varies a lot by what you sell. For May 2025, the BLS reports a median of $104,920 a year for sales representatives of technical and scientific products and $72,080 for those selling other products.
Can you make $500,000 a year in sales?
Yes, but few people do. For May 2025, the BLS reports that the top 10% of sales representatives for technical and scientific products earned more than $200,440 a year. Earnings of $500,000 sit well above that. They usually come from large commissions on big enterprise deals, from accelerators in a year far above target, or from senior roles that carry a whole region's number.
How do you become a great salesperson?
Good salespeople keep the habits. Great ones also study their own calls and the calls of the best people around them, and they get good at one more thing each quarter. The difference builds up over years.
Four things help most people move from good to great:
- Study the best seller on your team. Listen to three of their calls and write down what they do that you don't: how they open, how long they let the buyer talk, how they handle price. Then ask them why.
- Get very good at one part of the sale. Pick the stage where your deals stall most and work on it for a quarter. Discovery is often the best choice, because every stage after it depends on what you learned there.
- Learn the buyer's business. Read what your buyers read, learn the numbers they report on and use their words. A seller who understands how a dental clinic makes money sells scheduling software better than one who only knows the software.
- Teach someone newer. Explaining why a call went well makes you name what you do by instinct, which makes it easier to repeat.
How top performers think matters as much as what they do. Watch the session sales mindset: the way top performers think on seeing yourself as a peer to the buyer and staying calm about any single deal.
Where to start
Print the checklist above and pick the one habit you skip most often. Do it every day for two weeks, then add the next one. For the techniques to use once those habits give you more and better calls, go back to our guide to sales techniques.