5 Essential Tips for Building Better Customer Relationships
Your sales team’s long-term success is directly tied to their ability to form strong customer relationships, especially with their most profitable accounts.
Current customers are a valuable source of revenue—both from the initial relationship and through referrals they can provide.
Keep in mind that, if your sales team isn’t making it a priority to build and maintain strong connections with their most valuable customers, they’re risking encroachment from the competition.
Here are five tips to help your sales professionals build stronger customer relationships and maximize the revenue potential of the accounts they already have.
1. Maintain Trust and Rapport
Rapport should begin before your seller picks up the phone for the first time. It starts with research—professional and personal—and continues throughout the life of the buyer-seller relationship.
Coach your sales professionals to take the time to establish and cultivate common interests with their customers. Social media can be a great place to identify these interests.
In addition, encourage your sellers to research and understand the company’s needs and the individual’s professional pain points. Sellers should practice actively listening, with the intent to understand, as well as asking intelligent, open-ended questions and responding empathetically.
Having emotional intelligence is an important differentiator in sales. If your sellers are skilled at identifying a buyer’s behavior style and adjusting their approach to match, they’ll immediately gain trust.
Your team should be as transparent as possible with customers and follow through on commitments to build customer loyalty and trust.
2. Engage in a Structured and Responsive Way
Customer relationships that are nurtured in a structured and responsive manner grow in strength and value over time.
Coach your sales professionals to establish a consistent communication cadence so that customers feel supported and know what to expect from your brand and the seller they’re working with.
An effective communication process should include scheduled touchpoints, as well as responsive messages triggered by events such as customer complaints, engagement with content, customer questions, and customer celebrations such as company awards and milestones.
3. Provide Value Frequently and Consistently
Strong, long-term relationships grow stronger when they are rooted in mutual value. As a rule of thumb, your sales professionals should strive to provide value to the customer during every interaction and be seen as trusted advisors.
Be sure your team understands what their genuine value is in the customer’s mind as differentiated from your competitors.
With the right skills and tools to communicate value, your sales professionals will be able to continue providing that value throughout the customer lifecycle.
4. Prioritize Relationships
Building customer relationships and putting in the effort to maintain them requires time and energy. It’s not possible to effectively maintain all relationships at the same level.
Help your sales professionals understand which accounts are most valuable to them—as well as which customers they can provide the most value to—and prioritize those relationships.
Your sales professionals should spend time reviewing their accounts and organizing them into segments they can then prioritize. This type of exercise will help your sellers understand where they’re currently spending their time, and what shifts they should make to be as efficient and effective as possible.
5. Connect with Multiple Stakeholders
One-on-one customer relationships are critical to retaining and expanding large accounts. But connecting with a single individual is riskier than building relationships with multiple stakeholders within the organization.
Teach your sales professionals to identify all the key influencers, champions, and deciders by mapping out the buyer decision-making process. Doing so will allow your sellers to establish and maintain relationships across the organization.
When sales professionals strengthen multiple relationships, they insulate the account against the risk of one person leaving the company or changing positions, while strengthening their own standing within the organization.
Multiple relationships also help the seller both identify when there are new opportunities within the organization and to gain access to stakeholders for those opportunities.
Have a Strategic Approach to Account Management
In today’s selling environment, success means your team must focus on customer service and strategic account management.
Help your sales professionals build strong customer relationships and maximize the revenue potential of their most profitable accounts with the Strategic Account Management training program from The Brooks Group.
The program teaches participants a highly-practical system for developing each of their key accounts in ways that will strengthen the customer relationship—and drive additional sales revenue for your company.
