Siddharth Dabhade 
Managing Director @ MiQ | Leading Programmatic Technology Innovator
The core principle of Marketing comes from an intersection of science + art + human behaviour. As a lot of you will be starting or planning to accelerate your marketing careers, I am happy to share 5 essential skills that have helped me to be a successful marketer.
In 2008, I was at Microsoft looking after a territory in South India region. The 2008 financial crisis hit hard every business. Majority of business in South India was hit as it was not only impacted by India slowdown but also outsourcing business was hit because it was directly connected to US Economy. It was a tough period, we applied numerous strategies and some clearly proved to be very effective. Those learnings are very useful in the current times during this pandemic as well.
In my experience here are the ways in which you can learn sales and be a top-notch professional.
Observe what good salespersons in your organization do – If you are working in a sales organization, this is absolutely important and fastest way to learn. I have observed many strong sales persons (and not all were in sales!) and many interesting styles to sell. Observe very closely how the best sales persons in your organization bring in sales, how do they fix their appointments, how do they ask questions, pitch and handle objections from clients. How do they position themselves and so on.