Trying To Boost Sales? What Are You Doing To Build Relationships?
Cook
Everybody knows that relationships are important. But curiously, most sales organizations don't focus on relationships as a key component of their strategy and tactics. Most sales training does not emphasize relationships or building relationships that are effective and sustainable.
In late 2010, the advertising agency OgilvyOne Worldwide interviewed 1,000 salespeople around the world. More than two-thirds of the respondents in four different countries indicated that they believed the buying process was changing faster than sales organizations could respond to those changes.
Business, especially sales, is usually thought of in cognitive terms. The focus is on metrics and money. Goals and objectives are assessed quantitatively and individuals are reviewed on how well they attain their goals. When we do well, we continue to build by doing more of the same, although sometimes this doesn't sustain the business. If we did poorly, we change things, such as our products, services, activities, and any other thing that we think will help us get over the hump. We're vulnerable to the latest business thinking; we're searching for the key to success.
The odd thing is that when we seek to improve, we seldom look to improve our relationships. Our focus does not naturally go to our interactions and the results of those interactions. And most significantly, we don't think in terms of meaningfulness, either for ourselves or, more importantly, for our customer.
Paradoxically, we know that success in business is about the people. If you're across the desk from the customer and the deal is on the table, closing the deal depends almost entirely on the relationship of the people there.
Solutions Not Enough
The solutions-oriented salesperson — the mainstay of sales training for the last 20 years — has become the commodity. Customers expect that when a salesperson crosses their threshold, they need to bring more than solutions to the table. The customer expects that the solutions are the baseline for consideration. Solutions by themselves are no longer unique.
Add to this the world of instantaneous access to information and we have customers who are almost as well prepared as the salesperson when it comes to solutions. If a customer does not know the answer, a simple online query to Google, or a question posted on myriad social networking platforms will invite more information then the customer really ever needs.
How businesses interact, connect and access information is profoundly different today. These changes are widespread, and the ability to stand out in this highly interconnected business world is difficult. Working with customers in a sustainable and successful manner demands a new approach: a focus on meaningfulness in relationships.
Go Below The Surface
Meaningfulness is at the very core of understanding how relationships work. Every human needs to make meaning out of his or her life. This need is universal, crossing all cultures. Through every experience, we seek to be meaningful. And in every relationship, we seek to be meaningful.
Consider Bill, the managing partner of a successful and profitable mid-level financial services firm. When I asked him what the company did that made it different and successful, he responded simply: “Relationships are what we sell.”
The company's monthly marketing meeting is dominated by reviews of relationships, not tactical marketing activities. Bill asks the question: “What are you doing to perpetuate a relationship?”
Prerequisites for Bill and the firm's success are they know their solutions cold and that they either have an answer or know how to get it through their relationships.
This translates into revenue and profits. To paraphrase Bill, relationships are about establishing trust. Good relationships have a strong trust factor and dollars at the end.
Relationships supersede selling. They matter because selling today has evolved. Sales success in the 21st century depends on trust before solutions. Trust only builds when the relationship is strong. Shift the focus and you'll change the results in very dramatic and positive ways.
Ken Cook is managing director of Peer to Peer Advisors and co-author of How To WHO: Selling Personified, a book and program for building business through relationships. Learn more at www.howtowho.com.
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