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The Soft Skills Every Employer Demands in Marketing and Sales

Sep 06, 2025
 

Do you want to know why employers today value soft skills even more than technical ones? The answer could define your professional future.

๐Ÿ‘‹ Welcome:
Hello, how are you? I’m Dr. Carlos Valdez, founder and director of MercadotecniayVentas.com, an educational portal where 90% of our content is free. Our mission is to educate and inspire students, academics, and professionals in marketing and sales through innovative and practical content, aimed at developing essential skills for creating value.


And this is our video audio blog of September 6, 2025, titled:
The Soft Skills Every Employer Demands in Marketing and Sales.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are defined as the set of socio-emotional, interpersonal, and cognitive competencies that allow people to function effectively in professional and social contexts. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2015), soft skills include communication, teamwork, adaptability, critical thinking, and leadership, among others, and are considered essential for success in today’s labor market. Similarly, the Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum highlights that these skills are fundamental to facing technological disruption and changes in the labor market (World Economic Forum, 2020).

These skills are not directly related to mastering a specific tool or technical discipline but to how individuals interact, solve problems, and adapt in the workplace. For example, a marketing specialist may master digital analytics tools, but if they cannot clearly communicate with their team or handle pressure in a client negotiation, their performance will be limited. Likewise, in sales, empathy and active listening can make the difference between closing a contract or losing an opportunity.

In this post, we will focus on the most in-demand soft skills in marketing and sales, analyzing why they are so relevant and how you can demonstrate them to employers.

Why are soft skills so important for employers?

Employers emphasize soft skills because they are what truly enable a professional to turn technical knowledge into tangible results for the organization. Clear communication prevents misunderstandings and accelerates projects; teamwork allows different departments to collaborate on successful campaigns; critical thinking helps make better decisions under pressure; and emotional intelligence builds strong relationships with clients and colleagues.

In an increasingly digitalized world, technical skills can be learned or updated relatively quickly, but soft skills require continuous practice, self-awareness, and experience. For this reason, they have become the key differentiator among candidates with similar academic backgrounds or technical expertise (LinkedIn Learning, 2023).

The most in-demand soft skills in business, marketing, and sales

Employers in marketing and sales seek professionals capable of generating results but also of connecting with people. Among the most valued soft skills today are (NACE, 2024):

  1. Effective communication: Expressing ideas clearly, persuasively, and tailoring them to different audiences. In marketing, this means presenting convincing campaigns to clients or explaining strategies to internal teams. In sales, it means listening carefully and responding to customer needs in a personalized way.
  2. Teamwork: Collaborating across departments and building joint solutions. Modern marketing is interdisciplinary, requiring designers, analysts, and strategists to work together. In sales, coordination with logistics and customer service is essential for closing deals successfully.
  3. Critical thinking: Analyzing information, questioning assumptions, and proposing improvements. For example, when evaluating a digital marketing campaign, critical thinking helps identify which indicators truly reflect impact and which need adjustment to improve ROI.
  4. Leadership: Inspiring, guiding, and motivating both colleagues and clients. A good marketing leader not only gives instructions but inspires a team to innovate and propose creative ideas. In sales, leadership means motivating representatives to achieve ambitious goals with integrity.
  5. Emotional intelligence: Managing one’s own emotions and understanding those of others to build strong relationships. In marketing, this helps design empathetic messages that connect with consumers. In sales, it allows professionals to handle customer objections calmly and close long-term deals.
  6. Adaptability: Adjusting to constant market changes and new technologies. Digital marketing evolves every week with new tools and trends, while in sales adaptability means quickly responding to changes in consumer behavior or economic conditions.

5 Strategies to communicate your soft skills to employers

  1. Examples in interviews
    Instead of saying “I’m a good communicator,” tell a concrete story about how your communication resolved a conflict or facilitated a sale. For example, explain how you convinced a hesitant client with a clear presentation tailored to their needs.
  2. Portfolio with evidence
    Include presentations, collaborative projects, and leadership cases in your portfolio to show how you applied soft skills. If you worked on a marketing campaign, add metrics and describe your role as the team’s facilitator.
  3. Recommendations and testimonials
    Ask professors, colleagues, or supervisors for short recommendations that highlight your teamwork, adaptability, or leadership. A testimonial about your ability to motivate a team or resolve conflict speaks louder than any claim in your résumé.
  4. Optimized digital profile
    On LinkedIn, describe achievements with actionable statements: “Led a team of 5 to launch a digital campaign with measurable results.” Also, use the skills section to highlight the soft skills employers seek most.
  5. Competency-based language
    Use clear expressions aligned with today’s workplace framework: problem-solving, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and professional ethics. Instead of generic phrases, demonstrate how these competencies directly impacted your professional results.

Conclusion

Today more than ever, employers are looking for soft skills before anything else. You may be excellent at the technical skills of marketing and sales, but if you lack communication, teamwork, or adaptability, it will be difficult to stand out. Hard skills open the door, but soft skills keep you inside.

For those about to graduate in marketing and sales, the strongest employability path is to speak the language of competencies and observable behaviors, and to show evidence through assurance of learning logic: results, measurement, and continuous improvement, while incorporating current practices in the profession—data-driven decisions, responsible integration of artificial intelligence, and effective communication.
With this, you will present a professional profile with clear and relevant evidence of what you can do.

I hope you put these strategies into practice in your job search in marketing and sales, and that you get the job you’ve been aiming for. If you do, I would be glad to hear from you; share your story at [email protected].

I’ll leave you with a reminder that 90% of our content at MercadotecniayVentas.com is free. Also, once you start your first job in marketing and sales, I recommend the Red Manual for Marketing and Sales Coordinators. It’s not a book, but a manual and practical guide to help you remember the most important marketing topics and how to use them with artificial intelligence.

I wish you great success in your job interviews and remind you that in marketing and sales we must always…

Generate value!

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