1. Make yourself a reliable source for industry news. Provide your customers with a steady stream of news they can use to improve their business.
2. Under promise and over deliver. Delighting your customer is all about managing their expectations.
3. Build a rapport with your customer. Find some area of common interest that you can refer to each time you visit. Sports, food, family, hobbies and current events (but steer clear of politics) are topics to explore for common ground.
4. Be yourself but adapt. Share all of your winning personality with your customer but don’t over or under-whelm them. If your personalities are alike you’ll probably have smooth sailing, but if they are opposites the waters might get choppy. Opposites attract but the risk of misunderstanding is high. Mitigate the risk by adapting your personality to match your customer’s. The fact is you have a range of personality styles that will take you to the edge of your comfort zone, allowing you to adapt while remaining authentically you.
5. Model openness and authentic communication by sharing your own experiences, good and bad, with your customers. Communicate all your expectations; and be prepared to negotiate them. Initiate the conversation if you suspect misaligned expectations.
6. Made a mistake? Admit it, apologize, fix the problem and move forward. Make it perfectly clear that you accept your responsibility but don’t make your customer uncomfortable and hold back progress by over apologizing, either. Once is enough.
7. Check for understanding after every discussion of sensitive issues. Trust your instinct if you feel something is amiss. Confront problems tactfully, avoiding the human tendency to fix the blame not the problem.
Seven Ways to Enhance Client Relationships - To learn more about this author, visit John Brennan's Website.
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John Brennan
(Visit John's Website)
John Brennan Ed.D.
Dr. Brennan is President of Interpersonal
Development, LLC, a training and
development firm. Interpersonal
Development has provided sales training
and coaching to more than 3,000 sales reps
from over 100 companies.
A native of Australia, Dr. Brennan
received his doctorate from the University
of Rochester. His dissertation researched
the effectiveness of Behavioral Modeling
Technology in training people in
interpersonal skills. While he has spent
most of his career designing or delivering
training, he was also a Vice-President of
Sales of a training and development
franchise with operations in 25 markets.
Dr. Brennan has designed and delivered
sales training in North America, Asia,
Europe, Australia and the Middle East. He
has been a guest speaker at numerous
national and regional professional
conferences.
When Microsoft wanted Best Practices
articles on sales for their web site, they
called Dr. Brennan. The results are at office.microsoft.com/e
n-us/FX011387391033.aspx
His firm’s clients have included Volvo,
The Prudential, Merrill Lynch, Eastman
Kodak, Gannett, Equifax Europe, the
Economist Group and countless small
businesses.
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