The Art of Business is the Art of Relationships
The Art of Business is the Art of Relationships. After all, wouldn’t you rather do business with someone you know and like rather than with someone you don’t know or don’t like? So if that’s the case, doesn’t it make sense that the more relationships that you have, the more business that you will also have? So how do you create more relationships? Networking, that’s how.I’ve said it many times, the art of networking is the most crucial skill to your sales career. Networking leverages your sales ability by maximizing the amount of eyes and ears that are working to send you recommendations and warm leads.Networking is not about using people. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Networking is about forming deep and long lasting relationships with people that hopefully can help you to acheive your goals. And the best way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want.
I’ve been to networking functions and seen “sales professionals” walking around with a pocket full of business cards, just handing them out to anyone that will take them. They walk up, introduce themselves, hand out their card, ask for a card in return and then without much more investment of time, they walk off looking for someone else to do it again with. How much benefit do they really believe that they are going to get by spending an average amount of about five minutes with each person that they meet? How much can you really find out about someone in five minutes? How much real bonding is going on here. The problem is that unless there is an immediate reward, most people don’t want to invest much time in building a new relationship.
The other mistake that I see at networking functions is when the attendees seek out people that they already know and spend most of their time just chit-chatting. This is not networking. As long as you are taking the time to attend these networking functions, you might as well try to meet some new people. And when you do, take a real and genuine interest in them and their careers and look for ways that you can be of benefit to them. By taking an interest in them and their job, you are demonstrating to them the value of a relationship with you. When they realize that you are not trying to get something out of them, but instead you are looking to help them, the seeds of trust are planted and trust is the foundation of a strong relationship. But what about you and your needs? Well, the rule of reciprocity will take care of that. No one can be helped without them feeling a need to return the favor. And here is where a leap of faith comes in. Even if the person that you are helping is not in a position to return the favor immediately, somehow, someway, your benevelance will be rewarded, perhaps even from some unexpected source.
By repeating this process multiple times over the course of your career, you will create a network of valuable business contacts that leverage your sales ability by having more eyes and ears looking out on your behalf.
Relationship Selling
There are only two types of selling; low price selling and relationship selling. The former is based on having the lowest priced product on the market and the latter is based on building a relationship with your prospects and customers in order to better positioning yourself, your product and your company to allow other criterion besides just price to play a part in the customer’s selection process.The problem with low priced selling is that there isn’t a product made that somehow couldn’t be made cheaper by someone else. As a result, low priced selling yields such thin margins, that as a business model, it’s an risky strategy at best. It’s also a lazy way to try and build a sales career.These days, large companies have sophisticated purchasing departments that are trained to “commoditize” products. Their training has led them to believe that it’s to their advantage to use the leverage of a bidding situation where everyone is competing against each other for their business. In doing so, they promote an environment of price discounting as their main selection criterion. If you as a salesperson follow lock-step-in-line and play along, even if you win their business, you will lose. If low priced selling is a lazy way to build a sales career, it’s also a lazy way for purchasing agents to buy products. But that’s their problem. You’re problem as a salesperson is to find ways to create value for your customers in order to justify a fair price so that both you AND your firm can make enough profit to sustain long-term survival. That’s where relationship selling comes in.Without an existing relationship, even if you have the best valued product offering, you may never get an opportunity to present your case. Every salesperson understands how hard it is to get an audience with a customer who is in immediate need of your product. In the heat of a large product purchase, buyers become scarce and hard to reach. When you look at it from the buyers side, this scarcity is understandable as the rate of the incoming call bombard increases exponentially the closer they get to a large dollar purchase. Afterall, the people involved in the purchasing decision have other responsibilities to tend to and they tend to view salespeople as an intrusion into their work day. So what’s a salesperson supposed to do? Well, the answer is to build the relationship ahead of time. If you think about situations where you already had a great existing relationship with a buyer, you’ll realize that those buyers don’t put up the traditional walls that you’ll find in other situations where there is no existing relationship.Relationship selling won’t guarentee that you will always will the business, but it does guarentee that you will at least get a chance to position your product as the front runner. Once you have built a trusting relationship with your customer, don’t impune the relationship by assuming you will automatically win all of his business just because you buy him a few lunches from time to time. Relationship selling is about bringing value to your customer in many forms. Primarily you should strive to understand his business to the point that you can provide real business solutions for him. He has given you the opportunity to get to know him. Take advantage of the situation and get to work. Create value, create business solutions. Make his job easier, help him to somehow do his job better and make him look good to his boss for having selected you as his business partner. I promise you, that not something that the low priced vendor is going to be able to doing because he’s off trying to find his next deal since he didn’t make enough profit on his last deal.
Waiting to Exhale
OK. So I finally have a couple of nice proposals out and now all I can do is hold my breath till I hear back. It’s sort of like the “quiet period” before a company has their IPO.
Once you turn in your proposal, what’s a salesman supposed to do? Unfortunately, there’s really not a whole lot that you can do. Most of the selling has been done and the next few days you really need to be careful not to wear your welcome out by making too many follow up calls. Of course, depending on the relationships that you have with the prospect, you can try to surreptitiously find out through an inside ”sponsor” or “coach” how your proposal is being received.
A sponsor or coach is someone, typically inside the organization, that wants you to win the business. He may or may not have a stake in the outcome, but for whatever reason, he definitly wants you to prevail. A sponsor/coach is someone, in or outside of the organization that has influence on the buying decision. A good sponsor/coach can be your eyes and ears into the inner sactum of the buying organization, and if you’ve done the ground work properly, the coach is actively involved in the selection process.
In the book Strategic Selling, Miller-Heimman list the four “buyers” in an organization. The four buyers, in no particular order are, 1) the Technical buyer, 2) the Financal buyer, 3, the user buyer, and 4) the Sponsor/Coach. The one that I try to spend a disportionate amount of my time trying to develop a relationship with is the Sponor/Coach.
A “buyer” as defined by Miller-Heimman can be one person or it can be a committe of two or more people. In small companies, one person may play two or more of these buyer roles. But in larger companies, the roles are generally more distributed.
The Technical buyer is charged with writing the specification requirements. The Financial buyer is the person who will actually approve the budget and perhaps even write or sign the check. This is typically a upper managment position position like a CFO or departmental manager. The user-buyer is the person or persons that will be using the product. These are obviously all important people to get to know and anyone of them can prevent or propel you to success. You definitly don’t want to be on the bad side of any of these particular buyers, because one buyer against you can out-weight three buyers for you.
One of the points that Miller-Heimman makes is that the better you know all four buyers, the better your chances are at winning the business. Which means, of course, that the less you know the four buyers, the worse off are your chances of winning the business. Heimman-Miller even go as far as recommending that you make a “roster” of sorts and making sure that you at least have a name filled out next to each of the buyers positions. I promise you, if you cannot fill in all of the names of the people playing these various positions, you probably aren’t as solid in the account as you think you are.
So once the jury is out, if you have your roster filled out, and you haven’t gotten on the bad side of any of buyers, and you have a good sponsor/coach pulling for you and giving you inside information, you won’t have to hold your breath till a verdict is annouced, because you have done your homework and you’ve done the groundwork and your chances of winning the business are better than any of your competitors.
Listening is the Key to Selling
How well do you listen?
Nobody thinks that they are bad listeners. In fact, most people think that they are great listeners. But most people would be wrong, because in most cases, people tend to over-rate themselves on their listening abilities.
We have six senses (that right, six) and if you aren’t using three of them to listen with, then you aren’t really trying.
“Listen first with your eyes, then with your ears.” If you have wandering eyes, you aren’t really listening. Many people (I included) have the habit of looking beyond the speaker. Have you ever found yourself engaged in conversation with someone, when you are distracted by another person behind them? That’s what I mean by looking beyond the speaker. You should always be making eye contact with the person speaking to you Try not to be distracted by movement or noise. If you want to become a better listener, you need to work on your eye contact. If you break eye contact with your conversational partner, you aren’t really listening.
Hearing isn’t listening. Just because you are hearing the words, that doesn’t mean that you are listening.
Listening is the act of allowing the other person to express their feelings completely, without interuption and without any preconceived notions on your part, with the intent to fully absorb and process what they are saying so that you can appreciate their meaning and understand how they are feeling. As we break down the definition, piece by piece, you’ll see that there is a lot of things going on here.
First is the act of allowing the other person to express their feelings completely. You are NOT listening if you do not allow the other person to express their feelings completely. Depending on the person, sometimes this might take a while and we can get impatient and our attention may wander. Try to be “mindful” and “stay in the moment”. This means, that no matter how much they talk, and no matter how bored you may be, you have to train yourself to be patient and train your mind not to wander off to some other place.
The next part of listening is “without interuption”. This should be a “no-brainer”, but some salespeople still do it. Interupting people in the middle of sentences is about the rudest thing that you can do. Interuption is saying to the other person, “what I have to say is much more important that what you have to say”. Not a good way to gain a customer.
The third part of listening is to listen ”without preconceived notions”. If you think that you already know what the other party is trying to say, then you aren’t really going to listen very well. After all, you already know what they are going to say, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Sales people are the worst at this. They think that they already know how to sell you, so they don’t listen to what your needs are. This mistake alone can cost you thousands of dollars in lost commisions over the life of a sales career. Learn to listen without preconceived notions because everybodies motiviations are different.
The fourth part of the definition is to listen ”with the intent to fully absorb”… It’s hard to “fully absorb” everything. But at least have the INTENT to “fully absorb” everything. By trying to fully absorb everything, you might absord the most imporatant parts, at least. But if you don’t even have the intention of fully absorbing what someone is saying, you’ll surely miss some of the most important parts.
The fifth part is to “process what they are saying”. This means you have to THINK about it! Assimilate what they told you and run it through your cereberal cortex and try to decipher what they are trying to say. That is the sixth part; “trying to understand their meaning”. Processing what they are saying and trying to understand their meaning are two different steps. One is the process and the other is the output.
The seventh part is to try to understand how they are feeling. Notice I said to try to understand how they are feeling. I didn’t say try to understand what they said. This is where your sixth sense comes in and this is where the rubber meets the road. Some customers might not want to tell you exactly how they feel and others might not be ABLE to tell you how they feel. In selling, there are two kinds of needs, expressed and implied. Although that is a lesson for another time, an example of an expressed need is some one that tells you their car is old and keeps breaking down, so they need to buy a new one. An example of an implied need is if they are looking at a Mercedes Benz, they could have an implied need of buying a car for a status symbol. If you can understand how your customer “feels”, you will make a sale.
In business, motivations for buying can come in many forms. The more you understand how your customer feels, the more sales you will make and the longer you will keep them as a satisfied customer.
There’s one more thing that I want to point out. Nowhere in that definition does it say anything about a response. If you want to respond, that is OK, but just remember, that is not part of the listening process, that is responding.
