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Building Relationship Capital - Sustainable Sales Success

Guest post by: David Newby

Article Overview: The most recent global recession has reminded businesses all over the world of some simple truths: - Customers have more choice than ever. - Customers will not continue to work with people they do not trust. - Customers can not be easily won back when they are lost (if at all). And yet, many sales organizations are still hiring people with the wrong skillset, and even worse, the wrong mindset! So, what factors are the most important in winning and retaining new business in the 21st Century?

Building Relationship Capital - Sustainable Sales Success

It is over 20 years since Neil Rackham published the ground-breaking book SPIN® Selling. (1) The result of 12 years of research, Rackham's book outlined a "consultative" sales mindset that revolutionized the way in which sales forces across the world dealt with their more sophisticated clients. Today, Rackham's model, or some derivative of it, has been adopted by most major sales organizations around the world. Of course, the world today is very different to the world of 20 years ago. Globalization and the Internet have made it a more competitive place and given huge choice to buyers with the result that organizations across the globe are struggling to differentiate their products and services.

Leading thinkers, including Neil Rackham, see the need for a different approach:

"For some years I've felt that classic selling-skills models, including many that I have created, rely too heavily on selling solutions to problems.

... Salespeople following problem-based models often fail to uncover opportunities until very late in the call - if at all.

... What is needed is an approach that encourages discussion of opportunities much earlier in the sales process". (2)

Similarly, Keith Dugdale and David Lambert, in Smarter Selling, outline a new sales "journey" for the 21st Century:

" ... where the buyer and seller collaborate, with the seller facilitating the buyer's thought process and helping them achieve their goals". (3)

This mindset of helping rather than selling, recommended by Rackham, Dugdale and Lambert, is a necessary shift, but a great challenge for many business consultants and salespeople who still feel most comfortable when they remain in absolute control of any sales discussion. Their deep reliance on what they know often prevents them exploring new opportunities, as in so doing, they face the danger of not having the answer.

The tide is turning though. An increasing number of forward-thinking salespeople and supportive sales organizations are emerging from the pack, having discovered that a clear focus on building and sustaining trust-based, collaborative business relationships is the very best way to gain loyal, high-value clients. The key to developing such relationships is to recognise that the relationship is more important than the sale, and to focus attention on asking the right questions rather than prescribing solutions.

As Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and more recently Social Intelligence puts it:

"This agendaless presence can be seen..... in many top-performing sales people and client managers. Stars in these fields do not approach a customer or client with the determination to make a sale..... Should they not have what's best, they'll say so - or even take a client's side in making a justified complaint about their own company. They would rather cultivate a relationship where their advice is trusted than torpedo their reliability just to make a sale".

The message is clear. Organizations who stand still as their competitors adapt to the changing sales world by really listening to clients' needs and priorities, and leverage their knowledge, business experience and contacts to genuinely help, will not only lose their most valuable clients, but also their best salespeople.

For individual consultants and salespeople, those who do not change will find that their clients become less loyal, and offer the old and safe excuse of "price" more commonly as a reason for not doing business. These people will justify poor figures by blaming an uncertain economy, and "commoditization" as a global trend. They will also find that employers begin to value skills they do not possess.

My advice? Listen to Rackham, Goleman, Dugdale and Lambert - learn the new skill-set, adopt the mindset, and adapt your behaviour. Now. It's not too late.

Sources

(1) SPIN® Selling, Neil Rackham (1988).

(2) Selling is Dead, Marc T. Miller and Jason M. Sinkovitz (2005)

(3) Smarter Selling, David Lambert and Keith Dugdale (2007)

(4) Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman (2006)

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Article Tags: 21st century, building relationship capital, global recession, new business, relationship capital, relationships, sales, sales organizations, sales success, skillset, Smarter Selling, SPIN selling, trust



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