Posted August 16, 2024

Exclusive: How to Forge Long-term Partnerships

Before you push to close the sale, start by building a bit of trust.

By Larry Cook, Vice President of Commercial Sales, Sellars Absorbent Materials.

Quite often salespeople are in such a hurry to sell a product that they forget the key to building and establishing an impactful relationship with customers is to slow down and start by creating trust.

Begin by Listening
If you’re new and are taking over an account or working on new opportunities, don’t go to the customer with an agenda. Instead, invest your time in listening and learning. Force yourself to listen and paraphrase so you can understand exactly what the customer is saying.

Build a Shared Agenda
Whether you are in a small or large setting, share your ideas for an agenda. You should also ask the customer to add their ideas. By doing this, you gain buy in and demonstrate to the customer that it’s about them, not you.

Empathize
Listen to where the customer is coming from, understand their perspective and acknowledge your understanding. Anyone who empathizes is earning the right to disagree (later on in the relationship) and be respected for their honest opinion.

Understand Your Customer
I’ve seen salespeople who jump the gun and try to solve problems for the customer, but they don’t even know if it’s the right problem or not.

Instead, ask great open-ended questions to determine how you can partner with the customer. This allows you to probe your customer’s needs without artificially framing the customer’s response or biasing them one way or another.

The objective is to hear what they have to say in their own terms. By doing this, you are showing them respect by allowing them to set the frame of reference and not forcing them to fit your viewpoint.

Give Away Ideas
In the book, "The Trusted Advisor," the authors say, “Expertise is like love — not only is it unlimited, but you can destroy it by not giving it away. It cannot be scanned into a database; rather, it is the uniquely human ability to redefine a problem and come up with creative solutions for solving it. It is what a successful advisor brings to every situation, and it only gets better with practice.”

Be Honest
If the customer gives you an opportunity but you don’t have a product that can address their needs, be honest with them. You can still be a resource by offering alternate suggestions.

In this situation, you need to take the long-term view. Short term you may be giving up something but long term you’re gaining their respect and trust, which is invaluable.

Learn from Others
Don’t be afraid to seek advice and insight from your colleagues. Take the top salesperson out to lunch and ask them about their toughest customers and situations and how they handle them.

You can also go outside of your company to learn. I have two resources that I value tremendously. "The Trusted Advisor" written by David Maister and Charlie Green and "Start with Why," by Simon Sinek.

In my experience, you have to be willing to place a higher value on maintaining and preserving the relationship instead of focusing on the outcome of a transaction. A committed sales advisor makes a substantial investment in the client, without guarantee of return, before the relationship even begins to generate income, let alone profit.

At the end of the day, sales success isn’t an overnight achievement. Instead, it’s a process that takes time to cultivate. However, solid relationships that are built on trust can be rewarding for both the customer and the salesperson for years to come. CS

Larry Cook, vice president of commercial sales for Sellars Absorbent Materials, has more than 30 years of experience and is a firm believer in creating a culture of excellence, investing the time necessary to develop strong customer partnerships and delivering a high standard of servant leadership.

Prior to joining Sellars, Cook led the re-engineering a 17-person sales force that accelerated revenue growth, significantly increased the mix of high value products and elevated the salespeople’s customer activity and contributions while maintaining the company’s culture and values.

Contact him at 1-800-237-8454 ext. 2; email: lcook@sellars.com

Learn more about Sellars products at www.sellars.com.

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