Modern Sales and the Lost Art of Relationship Building

The sales industry seems to experience major shifts every five or ten years. Many of these shifts are the result of the way technology changes. Others have to do with cultural ebbs and flows. But one of the more confounding changes over the last decade has been the lack of personal attention clients and prospects get in sales.

Why Relationships Matter

Over the years we’ve seen an influx of sales and marketing automation tools in the business world. The result? If there’s an aspect of your sales strategy that you want to streamline, there’s an app, software, or innovative tool to help you remove yourself from the equation and automate your interactions. But is this a positive development?

Sometimes automation is good. It can save time, improve accuracy, and promote greater consistency. But too much automation can hurt the overall health and vitality of your business. That’s because automation undercuts and compromises your ability to connect with prospects on a personal level and build relationships with them.

Customers are people. And what do people care about? If we’re being honest, we’re all looking out for numero uno: ourselves. We spend almost every second of every day thinking about how we can make ourselves comfortable, happy, healthy, or secure. Nearly every decision we make is a decision to put ourselves first.

This “me-centric” mentality may seem overly selfish, but it’s a part of natural selection and survival of the fittest. For millions of years, the animals that have survived the longest have been the ones that are capable of looking out for themselves. (The moment a small rodent loses focus in the vast expanse of the rainforest is the moment he’s eaten by larger, stronger prey. As soon as a soldier stops protecting himself in the line of battle, he gets a spear thrown through his chest, etc.)

We all care about ourselves – and that includes your sales prospects and clients. And if you want to appease this fundamental element of humanity, you have to make the person on the other end of the conversation feel special and important. You have to stroke their ego.

Relationships appeal to our sense of importance and belongingness. When we perceive that others care about us, it validates and reaffirms the notion that we matter. In the business world, as in our personal lives, this plays a distinct role in how we make decisions.

4 Tips for Building Stronger Relationships in Sales

Jim Davidson is the founder of Coral Gables Trust Company. For years he’s worked closely with business owners and successful professionals and he’s noticed the most successful people are the ones who have the deepest relationships with their clients.

Davidson recalls a story some years ago when he went on a hunting trip to South Carolina with a handful of friends. One night, in the wee hours of the morning, one of his friend’s phone rang. It was a VIP client of his whose son had just been arrested on narcotics charges. The client was desperate, emotional, and in need of comfort. Davidson’s friend stayed on the phone with him for two hours.

This may seem like an extreme example, but it speaks volumes. This individual had built such a solid relationship with his client that he called him in his greatest time of need.

You don’t need relationships that are this deep, but you should strive to go deeper than surface level. Here are some ways you can strengthen your sales relationships:

1. Don’t Screw Up the First Meeting

“When you use traditional sales language, potential clients can’t help but label you with the negative stereotype of ‘salesperson.’ This makes it almost impossible for them to relate to you from a position of trust,” entrepreneur Ari Galper writes.

Your first meeting with a prospect is often the most important. It sets the tone and establishes the first impression. But if you spend too much of this time focusing on a sales pitch, you’ll set the wrong tone. Instead, you need to foster a genuine connection.

ADVERTISEMENT

2. Listen More Than You Speak

There will be times for you to talk, but these moments are much fewer and farther between than you probably realize. The majority – or at least half – of your time spent with prospects should be listening.

When you listen, you get the chance to see where people are coming from. They’ll tell you what they want and why they want it. This eliminates much of the back and forth guessing game that often exists in the traditional sales process.

3. Find Common Experiences

If you want your relationship with prospects to go beyond the product or solution you’re selling, then you need to find some common ground. Whether it’s sports, mutual friends, hobbies, or interests, common experiences will pull you together and strengthen your sales pitch. Over time, these elements give you something to rekindle the relationship with. They’re invaluable in the big picture.

4. Be Transparent

You can’t hold back in your relationships. There eventually comes a point where you may have to create some commotion or insert a little friction.

As a sales consultant, Warren Wick writes, “The deeper the conversations become, the more transparency you need to provide. Sometimes you will actually have to tell customers something they don’t want to hear. That’s OK. Like any relationship — sales or otherwise — honesty helps both sides grow.”

Giving Weight to Relationships

You have to stop selling and start building meaningful relationships with prospects and clients. The person on the other end of the phone, email, or dinner table is an individual with specific needs, wants, desires, and frustrations. As you get to know that person, you’ll become aware of what matters to the individual, which gives you an opportunity to build a strong relationship that’s predicated on real connections and ideas.

Now’s your chance to revamp your sales strategy and include action steps that prioritize relationship building. If you don’t, one of your competitors will.

Source: https://tweakyourbiz.com
Image Credit: Depositphotos

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

The Role Of Positive Relationships In Starting A Business

Think you are ready to start your own business? Congratulations, you're in good company. Entrepreneurship is right up there when it comes to building wealth quickly, and it can easily be gauged from the fact that 28 million U.S. business owners are driving 40% of all retail sales in the country. However, while it’s easier today than ever before to earn a living as a self-employed entrepreneur, being successful at it is not always a walk in the park.

Success is something that all entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs desire, yet it seems to elude most people — at least to the desired extent. So, what makes some business ventures successful while others fail?

The success of any business depends on several factors: habits, beliefs, passion, flexibility, attitude and, believe it or not, your relationships. There’s an age-old adage that goes along the lines of, "You are only as good as the company you keep." Human beings are hard-wired to be social, with the desire and need to connect with others. We thrive on healthy relationships; and yet, we often overlook the role of positive relationships in our success.

It doesn’t matter how hard you strive to be successful on your own; the people around you play an equally important role in getting you there. After all, they are the ones who remain your greatest advocates even when the going gets tough.

Entrepreneurship And The Power of Positive Relationships

Starting a business of your own is a challenging task — something that requires you to be in the absolute best frame of mind. It’s a road filled with uncertainties. This is a time when you need all the support in the world that comes from having positive relationships with those around you. It helps you feel healthier and happier as you take a plunge into the future. Strained relationships are harbingers of stress and anxiety, and do not bode well for your endeavors. Not having the support of your near and dear ones can hold you back from achieving your goals as well as hitting your milestones.

Relationships with your friends, family and those around you come with a mixed bag of emotions — love, generosity, kindness, and even hatred, envy or resentment. Both positive and negative emotions have the power to impact your successes or failures in business respectively. It is crucial to understand this and work on building your relationships first before venturing out in search of success.

Positive Relationships Are Fun And Build Confidence

If you are planning to be an entrepreneur (and in the process of starting a business from scratch), then you are probably already familiar with the challenges in store. It’s daunting, and quite possibly, you could end up spending all or most of your time worrying about building the brand and the business. No wonder, then, it’s a common belief that entrepreneurs are serious people who don’t have fun. Thanks in part to the troubles in the early stages of entrepreneurship — finding more money, managing resources and team conflicts — work-life balance can seem unattainable. However, daunting as it is, the life of an entrepreneur doesn’t need to be lacking in fun and enjoyment.

Positive relationships with family and friends can help you get out of the rut and help you relax. They can also help you build your confidence quickly, and enhance your creativity. Be as grateful as possible: For example, make it a point to note three positive things your partner did that day — something nice that they said, did something out of their love for you, or showed generosity to someone else. Despite everything, do this to remind yourself of what you appreciate about them. It will help you feel positive not just about yourself, but about your work as well.

Besides, if things take a downturn for a while, you need the extra confidence that comes from those who understand you recognize your talents even more than you do yourself. You definitely want to be in the company of positive people who comfort and guide you — people who support your decisions and encourage your efforts, even when the chips are down.

Having a successful relationship with those around you is a precursor to succeeding in business as well — a fact backed by evidence. According to Noam Wasserman, a Harvard Business School professor, it’s 'people problems' that sink most startups. He feels that 65% of all businesses fail, not due to under-capitalization or lack of planning, but due to conflict and relationship breakdown between partners. Strive to address any relationship issues as early as possible, before they get out of hand. Let people know that your trust in them will help overcome any difficulties over time, and together, you will prevail.

Relationships are complicated, and business relationships are even more so. The art of succeeding in business relationships stems from your experiences handling your personal relationships. Much like personal relationships, business relationships need a strong foundation. Positive relationships teach you the much-needed skills for succeeding in business — the skills of complementing and of mutual admiration.


Finally, you need to realize that personal relationships do not take a backseat as you prepare yourself for building your empire. Your business goals do not, after all replace your family responsibilities, daily routines and chores. Account for these responsibilities when setting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Having positive relationships as the guiding force behind starting your business will help to clarify your goals and the type of business you might choose to build.

Source: https://www.forbes.com
Image Credit: Shutterstock


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business organization focused on providing our members and guests with an extraordinary networking experience, bringing business professionals together for the sole purpose of generating new relationships and developing new business opportunities. Not a member, learn how you can become a member and join this awesome group of professionals to connect and grow your business.

Stay Connected with WNFP!

5 Ways Building Relationships With Influencers Can Benefit Your SEO Campaign

By now, the phrase “influencer marketing” is pretty familiar to most marketers. The basic concept is easy to grasp—you’ll be using the existing popularity and authority of social “influencers” to build a reputation and visibility for your own brand.

But influencer marketing isn’t a “hack” or a get-rich-quick scheme; like any other marketing strategy, it demands a nuanced approach to be successful, and is packed with far more variables than it appears to have on the surface.

As an SEO (search engine optimization) professional, I gravitate toward using influencer marketing as a tool to improve the effectiveness of my SEO campaigns. Recognizing that many search optimizers—especially new ones—may fail to see the potential here, and even more marketers misunderstand the true potential of influencer marketing, below I’ve listed five ways that building relationships with influencers can actually boost your SEO campaign.

1. Inbound links.

Inbound links are necessary for any kind of SEO campaign. Links are what pass “authority” from one site to another, essentially making them points of validation that convince search engines your site is authoritative and trustworthy enough to earn higher rankings. It’s becoming more and more difficult to get inbound links, but one way to get them is to build a relationship with a known influencer; they’ll often link to your site if you give them good reason to. For example, if you have a relationship with an influencer and let them know about some recent original research you recently published, that influencer might comment on it and link to your research, which, presumably, is hosted on your website. You’ll gain a boost in authority from the link, but just as importantly, the presence of that link will result in click-through traffic from other readers as well as increase its visibility so that other authors can reference it (with a link) it in their work as well.

2. Content visibility.

Depending on the nature of your relationship, you can also leverage your influencer’s audience to expand the visibility of your best content. Social influencers typically have tens of thousands to millions of followers, so getting an influencer to share one of your best pieces of content could instantly multiply its visibility. More readers alone won’t necessarily boost your rankings, but it’s a nice gateway to future points of value. For example, if your content circulates with an audience 10 times larger than what you could muster on your own, you’ll likely earn 10 times as many links overall—and that’s not even mentioning the reputation benefits your brand will earn.

3. Audience building.

Networking with influencers is also a fast way to grow your social media audience (as well as recurring traffic to your site). Social media runs on a “tree falling in the forest” system; no matter how good your content is, people will only follow you and continue reading your material if they know it exists in the first place. Getting an influencer to share that material could introduce a new audience to you. Again, this alone won’t increase your search rankings, but over time, a larger audience means each of your published pieces will have instantaneously better value when you syndicate them.

4. Collaborative content.

Don’t discount the potential for working together with influencers on mutual content projects, either. This probably won’t be an option to you in the early stages of your influencer relationships, but once you have an ongoing, mutually beneficial setup, this may become a natural element of your partnership. Working together, you might pool your resources to create and distribute an industry report, or you could conduct an interview series or create a podcast in which you exchange thoughts and opinions on a popular topic. Either way, you’ll both get the benefit of borrowing from each other’s authority, you’ll earn more visibility than you would alone, and you’ll both earn a host of new links pointing to your respective domains. This is a long-term partnership, so the payoffs have no upper limit here.

5. Publishing opportunities.

Even though you’ll likely earn some links naturally with your content and influencer marketing campaigns, the best way to build links consistently over the long term is through highly valuable content on external, authoritative publisher sites. The problem is, these publisher sites have extremely high standards for content, and are selective about who they let write. Networking with influencers can, over time, open up doors that would otherwise be closed to you. For example, one of your influencers might be close with the editor for a national publisher, and could get you an introductory opportunity to make a guest post. Sometimes, a foot in the door is all it takes to start building a bigger online footprint.

Finding the Right Influencer

Much of your success in influencer marketing will be finding the right influencer and starting your relationship on the right foot. The best influencers are ones who are active constantly, with big followings, and an interest in engaging with others.

When you reach out, make sure you remain conscious of the fact that they’re busy people with their own goals and priorities—make an offer before making a request. Then, prioritize achieving the goals I listed above, always making the relationship mutually beneficial, and doing what you can to preserve your dynamic.




Source: https://www.forbes.com
Image Credit: pexels.com




ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!