Building relationships - Partnering Up Pays Big
People prefer to do business with people they like!How do you do
that? One of the most rewarding aspects of great sales training is teaching others how
building great relationships with prospects, customers and their
client referrals. This article is about building relationships.
Building relationships is foundational to performance improvement
and transcends all areas of your life at work, play and at home.
A good Trainer will teach that the most important person in a
conversation is the other person! Steering and focusing the
conversation on what is happening in the other persons life will be
90% of the conversation in the sales process. The other 10% will be
the sales person questioning and gathering feedback. (Yet,
statistics will show you that 80% of sales professionals still do
not do this even after training because the skill is not practiced
enough!)
These statistics show that Sales Trainers and Talent Management
still have a lot of collaborating to do! Sales Training Drivers.com
is committed to helping the Workplace Learning Industry foster more
of this collaboration and help sales professionals stay on target
to meet their professional and personal goals.
The business goal of building relationships is to teach how to move
the sales forward for mutual benefit. Show your sales team that
building rapport is broken down by value percentages representing
the highest amount a prospect will likely receive and absorb your
message during conversation. Rapport is comprised of your ability
to use:
1. Words (7%) - 93% of people only listen to 7% of what you say and
only remember 3%.
2. Tonality (38%) - the tone of your voice matched with someone
else's level of tone
3. Physiology (55%) body language, facial expression, posture,
stance, composure, movements, gestures
Learning how to use words and body language is crucial to successful selling (and training!). It must
be done over practice sessions, one on one coaching, role plays,
and measured evaluations. Practicing the use of specific words,
tonality and physiology during the sales process is an art in
itself. Less than 10% of sales professionals ever fully master
it! Your ability to present yourself appropriately and ask
questions will prompt people to give you the personal answers
you need to solve their issues and sell them.
Teach active listening skills and questioning techniques that check
for agreement. It will show your sales team how to look at the
prospects problem from their point of view. Have your sales team
learn how to present your product or service as a valuable addition
to the security, comfort, and enjoyment of your prospects life.
Teach them how to become interested in their prospects lives.
(family, job, and recreation activities, and financial concerns).
This takes a lot of practice in building transferable behavioral
skills in relationship building.
We all want to feel special and we all want to feel OK. Many
customers will go miles out of their way to do business with
someone they like and will make them feel happy and appreciated.
Once someone likes you, they will bring you into their inner circle
of influence and their friends will become your friends. Your
business will grow much faster while other sales people who do not
build quality relationships are vulnerable to the ups and downs of
the economy, trends and budgets.