If there’s a sales professional you know who is consistently closing deals and exceeding sales goals, chances are that person is skilled at connecting with his/her contacts and nurturing those relationships. The essence of great selling is the relationships you establish and build, primarily with your prospects, but also with your current customers and with associates in your business network.
You don’t need to be a social butterfly or leave your specific human relations comfort zone to be great at relationship-building. All you need to do is employ the following tactics in your sales approach and you’ll see that making and fostering connections is a natural process which can lead to rewarding relationships with long-term advantages for both you and your contacts.
1. Find out what your prospects’ goals, issues and challenges are at the outset of your first call or meeting. By proactively inquiring about and learning your prospect’s needs, you demonstrate you care but also have the information you need to best respond to those needs and provide a solution.
2. Establish and maintain trust – this is very important to building and maintaining relationships. You want to make sure you protect the relationship you’ve formed by “walking the talk” — for example, if you tell your customers they can call you 24/7, be available to accept the call 24/7; or, if you promise to deliver something by a specific date or time, make sure you deliver on that promise.
3. Focus on what’s in it for them. As discussed in my last blog post, taking the opportunity to explain “what’s in it for them” is a critical juncture in every sales interaction. You need to convey to the prospect the value they’ll receive by buying from and working with you, and that point needs to be part of your core sales message in the early stages of your first call or meeting.
4. Listen. This is so vital to cementing your relationships and perhaps the greatest gift you can give any prospect. Your prospects are accustomed to having sales people talk at them and recite their product’s or service’s features without getting an understanding of their problems, needs or goals. By listening, you convey respect for what they have to say and in turn earn theirs.
The sales profession is crowded with people who are focused on just telling the customer about their product or service and making the sale — not on the customer. By interacting with your prospects in a heartfelt way, you’ll make that essential connection much more easily and help shorten your sales cycle. By continuing this approach as prospects become customers, you will strengthen that connection and create enduring relationships that will benefit you in multiple ways.
