Relationship Science: Building Connections Without Being Touchy Feely
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There’s no serendipity in sales.
“Not even that lead that closed after months of no contact happened for a reason?” you ask.
Nope.
Some trigger — prompted or unprompted — brought you back to mind and inspired contact. And while it may seem like this situation is completely out of your control, it isn’t. If you apply a strategy, you can trigger even the deadest of leads to come back to life.
According to Gleanster, only 50 percent of leads are sales ready, so building relationships for when they are ready is crucial. Furthermore, as we rely less on face-to-face communication, every salesperson must seek other ways to build relationships with new and established clients.
Overcome Obstacles to Build Relationships
Every good salesperson knows how important it is to practice empathy in the sales process. Understanding a lead’s thought process and reservations is a critical skill. However, you should also understand two important things:
Mindshare: Customers have a limited amount of thought real estate, and you’re competing with other salespeople, employees, family, reruns of “Lost,” etc. The moment you disengage from an active conversation with your customer, your mindshare with him decreases. You must retain mindshare, and something as simple as a gentle “just checking in” can do the trick.
Defense: Human beings are naturally defensive, so next time you approach a potential client who knows you want something, don’t be surprised if the answer is “no.” Building a good relationship pierces through that underlying self-defense and mistrust. Even a minor piece of personal information — like remembering that his kid was sick during your last call, for example — will work.
Nurture Leads and Tap Into Weak Ties
Breaking through defenses and maintaining mindshare are all about nurturing leads. Just as tended grapevines will yield better fruit, sales practices that involve constant attention will be more profitable.
According to Forrester, lead nurturing can generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at significantly lower costs — 30 percent, to be exact. So here are three ways you can obtain and nurture leads:
1. Follow up, and maintain regular contact. You should always establish a desired cadence for every relationship. This contact rhythm can be based on anything from the account’s level of importance to the stage of a particular deal or process.
Set manual reminders after each interaction based on a predefined interval, or use a service like Contactually, which automatically identifies when a relationship is due for a follow-up. Finally, show your client that the relationship won’t end immediately by setting a next step on each call.
2. Focus on building strong relationships. Far too often, we get caught up in the transactional nature of sales relationships, and empathy gets stripped out of digital communications.
According to Aberdeen Group, personalized emails improve conversion rates by 10 percent and click-through rates by 14 percent, so take a personal interest in your customers’ lives. Record the personal details they reveal, and ask about the things they mention, such as an upcoming vacation, during your next contact.
3. Remember the value of weak ties. Strong ties — like those with your friends from college and co-workers — know the same people, often hold the same beliefs, and share information rapidly. This causes very little “new” information or relationships to exist among individuals in this core group.
Weak ties, on the other hand, are filled with opportunities for new connections and information, so you should reach out as far as possible from your core connections to tap into the potential of weak ties.
Build Relationships With a Scientific Mindset
Looking at maintaining business connections from a scientific or analytical perspective allows you to put a process behind the practice. Instead of leaving relationship building up to chance, you can see these efforts as an ongoing sequence of actions with set intervals.
First, give your team a system to easily track and measure relationships. It should rely as little as possible on manual entry and allow the end user to track the overall sphere of relationships. Next, identify a sequence, qualification process, or rating system to track the importance or stage of the relationship. For each “bucket,” identify priority and contact intervals for every customer or lead.
Lastly, regularly examine the health of your team’s sphere of relationships, and set benchmarks for the quantity or quality of relationships at each stage.
Building relationships is all about staying engaged with as many of your key connections as possible, and applying an analytical process allows you to do so in an organized, reliable way. In sales, building relationships isn’t about being touchy feely; it’s about showing empathy and strategically breaking down defenses and obtaining mindshare to benefit your company and put your customers at ease.