Your organization needs a sales team
that does more than make presentations to prospective clients. It may have to build the kind of long-term relationships that engender trust in your company, which, in turn, ensures steady business.
Believe it or not, the ability to develop
long-lasting business relationships with
clients can be taught.
“This is more than just how you sell,” says
Vera Jasper-Lewis, executive director of
sales and marketing at Corporate College,
a division of Cuyahoga Community
College. “It’s how you develop a relationship with your clients. It’s the touchy-feely
part of selling.”
For instance, your company may have
technical experts who are brilliant in their
own field but lose confidence when having
to create better business relationships.
When in doubt, they fall back on their expertise, potentially boring clients and dazzling them with too many facts and figures.
Smart Business spoke to Jasper-Lewis
about defining the process of relationship
management and the training available in
Northeast Ohio.
Is business relationship management a part
of the sales process?
Definitely. Business relationship management is not only a part of the sales process,
but it’s a critical part that a lot of organizations leave out.
Management sometimes wants to make
the sales process very simple and easy to
assimilate, which can be the wrong
approach. That’s fine if you’re selling something where you don’t have a lot of repeat
business, like roofing services. But when
you depend on repeat business, your sales-people have to take special care to develop
relationships.
Does most business relationship management occur before, during or after a sale?
It’s ongoing. A good part of building trust
is before a sale ever goes down. The relationship building goes both ways, too. You
not only have to understand their business,
but you have to coax them to understand
your business before you can both begin to understand their problems and possible
solutions.
What are the keys to developing good business relationships?
Gaining clients’ confidence and trust in
you and your company is one of the keys.
Too often, consultants, salespeople or
other company representatives deluge
clients, or potential clients, with too much
information.
Relationship building is all about the fact
that — at gut level — it’s the salesperson
that they buy. During meetings, the salesperson not only represents the company,
he or she is the company.
It’s less about your product and a whole
lot more about how your representatives
connect with your client. They need to be a
trusted consultant, to understand the
client’s needs and to get to the core of what
is going on in the client’s company.
Equally important is the ability to draw
out unspoken agendas and to deliver messages the client may not want to hear.
Clients often think they know what they
want, but they may, in reality, need something quite different or more than they
believe. Another part of the relationship
building is to tease out needed information
without seeming to interrogate the client.
How do you build the necessary trust?
You must, first and foremost, be a person
of your word. If you tell the client you’re
going to do something, you have to do it. If
I tell someone that I’m going to send him
information, I send the information. People
trust you because you do what you say
you’re going to do and you’re looking out
for their interests. They feel you’re a partner in the process instead of a vendor.
Can nonsales personnel be taught business
relationship building?
Absolutely. I’m a great example of that.
More than 20 years ago, Westinghouse and
General Electric were looking for sales-people who were first and foremost technical people. I became one of the first non-business employees who was asked to sell
very technical equipment.
For some of the strong technical-based
people, converting to a sales-first mindset
just didn’t work. But some of us gained a
different perspective that had an impact on
what we designed because we developed
relationships with our customers.
It’s very easy to teach people how to build
business relationships, and most understand it, even if they don’t adopt it. It’s very
easy to grasp the concept if the teacher or
facilitator relates the process to the students’ own personal experiences.
Some subtopics included in teaching relationship building are 1) understanding the
customer’s customer, 2) the customer
experience, 3) past the sale and 4) developing a person-to-person relationship.
Building and managing a business relationship is a throwback to the days when
top executives knew each other so well
that they sealed a deal with a handshake —
before so much sales was conducted as if
products and services were nothing more
than commodities. The important thing is
that this kind of approach is not about
somebody buying something; it’s about
growing a partnership and helping customers better serve their own customers.
VERA JASPER-LEWIS is executive director of sales and marketing at Corporate College, a division of Cuyahoga Community
College. Reach her at [email protected] or (216) 987-2963.
