Leveraging Customer Relationships

"Five Reasons You Must Manage Your Customer"

Leveraging customer relationships can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare.

How often have you failed to close a deal even though you represented the brand leader, you offered state-of-the-art solutions, had the best price and you were the "best-of-the-best" when it comes to selling? What went wrong?

Many times the lack of success is because you:

1. Failed to identify the relevant relationships specific to your opportunity
2. Failed to leverage those relationships
3. Did not identify or understand the hidden agendas
4. Made faulty assumptions
5. All of the above.

Frequently, when speaking about managing and closing sales with sales manager, I'm surprised that the discussion rarely focuses on customer relationships. When selling focuses primarily on brands, products and services to close the deal, account managers often ignore their customers' buying processes, and the decision criteria of the individuals involved. They fail to understand how their customers actually make buying decisions.

Herein lies the need to identify relationships, leverage those relationships, and never make assumptions about your customer. In today's environment where more people are involved in the buying process, you must effectively manage these relationships. Very few sales methodologies effectively address this issue.

In order to close the deal, you need to know how your customer makes buying decisions. Specifically you need to know:

• What are the criteria specific to this particular deal?
• Who makes those decisions, and who influences those making the decisions?

You cannot assume the answers to these questions. You must identify an insider to provide this information. This process can be time-consuming. However, the impact on your sales strategy is well worth the time and effort required. The process itself simply requires focused observation of your customer's behavior, and questioning people at different levels of responsibility.

By focusing on leveraging customer relationships, you will be able to determine quickly whether you'll be able to close the deal or not. This knowledge alone can save you money, and allows you to reallocate valuable time and resources.

Knowing which customer relationships to leverage is important! Do not rely too heavily on old data. If the information is more than six months old, it's old news. I tell my clients to review their strategy map for every opportunity in thirty-day increments; responsibilities and people are changing faster than ever!

You are not the only vendor calling on your customer! Your competitors, if they are any good at all, are also managing relationships within your portfolio of customers. So who wins the deal? The sales professional that manages the relationships the best, has the best information, and can leverage what they know generally wins. And, by leveraging customer relationships, you have a high probability of creating internal sales agents within your customer base.

In conclusion, leveraging customer relationships is critical to the success of your sales team. Knowing how the buying decision is made and who makes it should vault you to the lead in most sales campaigns.

David Woods is a consultant specializing in Sales Effectiveness. For the past 30 years David has been building and helping clients build high performing sales and marketing departments. To reach him: Click Here or call 828-890-9013.

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