What Ails Your Sales? Here's The Cure

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By Ken Cook

Sales are not where you want them to be. So, what do you do?

Every business, at some point in time, deals with this dilemma. And since business is often thought of in analytical terms, what we do and how we do it are measured in the context of goal achievement. Goals and objectives are assessed quantitatively and individuals are given reviews based on attainment of goals.

These reviews tell us how we did. If we did well, we continue to build by doing more of the same. If we did poorly, we change things — our products, services, activities and any other thing that we think will help us get over the hump.

The natural inclination in business is to fix things: Improve the product, enhance the services, focus on the solution and make sure it's the right one for the customer, tighten up our ROI analyses and show the customer that he would be crazy not to buy our solution and show how much money the customer can save.

If you see you or your company in that description, you have a window into what you and your company value. You value solutions and sales. Identify prospects and needs, design solutions and present solutions. Persuade the customer regarding the solution, and either close or don't close the deal.

Here's the odd thing: The customer's decision to buy or not to buy is most often not related to the solution. It's related to the relationship with you. And 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.

Consider the approach the managing partner of a strong, mid-sized accounting firm took. For years, he participated in the weekly client review meetings. The discussions were dominated by project reviews, status updates and forecasts for billable hours and future projects.

One morning, the approach changed. This partner shifted the emphasis to the relationships; he asked each member of the team to talk about their relationship with the customer. Who do they know? How well do they know them? What do they understand about the person's anxieties and fears? What can they do to improve the relationship with the customer?

Project reviews and status updates were relegated to written reports, with just exceptions and issues discussed in the meetings. The result? Billable hours and customer satisfaction grew rapidly. The solutions, skills and expertise the team brought to the customers had not changed. What changed was what the firm valued — a focus on the person, not the account.

Success in business is all about people. If you're sitting across the desk from the customer and the deal is on the table, closing the deal depends almost 100 percent on the relationship of the people who are there. Competitors can equal your solution, so it's up to you to make sure competitors don't equal the strength and quality of your relationship.

The assumption is that everyone knows how to build relationships. After all, it's something we're taught as children — how to get along with others. Yet we're not taught how to do this; rather, we're told to do this with only small tidbits on how.

The truth is that building strong and trusting relationships is not always easy. If it were, every business development person, marketer and salesperson would be doing it and business success would be more abundant.

If you want to be good at relationships, you have to value them; value them over the solution, the ROI, or the strength of your product or service. Focus on interacting and listening skills. Learn what it means to build trust and take the necessary steps to make that happen. Understand the prominent role that risk and anxiety play in the customer's decision-making process.

Value relationships and focus on improving them to cure what ails your sales.

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Ken Cook is founder of Peer to Peer Advisors and developer of Building Business through Relationships. Learn more about this relationship-based approach at www.peertopeeradvisors.com.

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