Long Lasting Customer Relationships

In the old days, sales could be approached as a matter of mathematical probability and savvy street hustling. The higher the volume of cold calls made, the more new business could be landed. That kind of treadmill philosophy, however, based on the belief that getting new customers is more important than retaining existing ones. Worse, the belief only led to inefficiency, soaring costs, burnout, and breakdowns in trust.
Sadly, it has also led to a climate where consumers tend to believe they are being sold a bill of goods they don’t need or want. There is a price to be paid for losing trust, and not just in lost sales. In their new book, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship, Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig note a timely problem, relevant to the current economic climate: companies that use the requests for proposals (RFP) process to overcome a particular challenge. But rather than paying firms for their ideas, they steal them.


“Sales skills are life skills,” the authors write. “What makes us better at sales makes us better in life.” In other words, ask not what your customer can do for you, but what you can do for your customer. The more a customer prospers, the more you will, too. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play offers many salient points on customer relationship building. Here are 10 worth heeding:

1. Treat your customers like friends you want to keep, not as one-night stands. The sales forces with the highest potential for success are those that position themselves as advocates for the companies they serve. They are not merely peddlers; they are advisers, boosters, and comrades in arms who join customers in the trenches.
2. All sales are not equal. Sometimes, landing a big, seemingly lucrative contract may generate an immediate windfall, but it also can increase costs if seller/buyer expectations and values are not aligned. The authors have worked with companies that have lost hundreds of millions of dollars on pitches they wish they had never made.
3. Stop guessing. When it comes to relationship marketing, don’t assume you can read your customer’s mind or rely on your gut instinct. Schedule regular meetings with interested customers and mutually explore the playing field through their eyes. Moreover, ask tough questions about the direction they want to go in. Their epiphany will become your own.
4. Exercise patience. Before proposing a solution, it’s vital to ask the customer to describe their perceived problems and needs, and why they have enlisted you to address them.
5. Keep an ear to the ground. Listening to customers yields more business opportunities. Business management strategist Stephen R. Covey, writing in praise of the book, says, “This builds a synergistic partnership for future business, taking sales to a higher level — in both high-integrity, trustworthy, win-win relationships and increased business opportunities and revenue.”
6. Abandon cold calling for “warm calling.” No matter how smooth the pitch, cold calls are time-consuming, off-putting, and ineffective. Focus on building a network in the marketplace that convinces customers to call you.
7. Slow down to appreciate the value of “yellow light” moments. When we see a yellow light at a traffic intersection, the tendency is to speed up. In business, if a customer exercises caution about embarking down a certain path, slow down and consider their fears of being blindsided.
8. Inquire about the competition. Don’t believe that it makes you appear weaker or insecure. If you are asked to submit a bid for a project, it doesn’t hurt to politely ask what other firms have been solicited for the work. That gives you a chance to gauge the competition, and it provides insight into the customer’s thought processes.
9. Develop a schedule for meeting with customers. Realize that your job is not only to inform, educate, or entertain customers, but also to help them reach a decision. Meeting plans will shorten sales cycles, help you advocate for better solutions, and enable customers to make confident decisions that will reflect well on you.
10. Look forward, not backward. It’s a new world out there. Give your customers cause to eagerly await your arrival, not a reason to hide.

Once again, thanks to Ken Beaulieu for this wonderful topic and his wisdom on FuelNet.

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Best to you,

Jim Herrera

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