The Ties That Sell

At the moment you close a sale, you and your customer may be joined by just a handshake and a contract. You must then turn that union into a relationship that your buyer values as much as you do. As a trainer, professional speaker and author of the book Relationship Selling, Jim Cathcart knows what it takes to keep buyers and salespeople together. His techniques will help you start, maintain and expand relationships through trust, commitment and communication.

“It’s not about transactions,” Cathcart explains, “it’s about making a difference for people.” When you’re ready for a serious customer relationship, Cathcart’s strategies will help keep you and your buyers too close for competitors to come between you.

Relationships blossom or wither based largely on the attitudes of the participants. Cathcart claims that to coexist in profitable peace and harmony with buyers, you must change how you think about selling. Set today’s transaction aside, he says, to save all of tomorrow’s sales.

Of course with a quota hanging over your head, changing your “sell for today” mentality can be tough. To clear that mental hurdle, Cathcart says to think less about what you are doing and more about why you do it. In other words, forget the actual sale long enough to remember the real meaning behind it. Huge improvements in performance often result.

“At the Atlanta airport,” he explains, “I saw a busboy who was clearly miserable cleaning off the tables in a busy food court. When I finished my breakfast, I went over and tapped him on the shoulder. He recoiled as though he were in trouble, and I said, ‘What you do makes a difference here. If you didn’t clean these tables, this place would be a mess and people would not eat here. What you do matters, and I wanted to thank you for it.’ I swear he grew six inches. He made more eye contact with people and probably did his work better for the rest of his shift. My praise shifted his thinking away from his task to why he was doing it and why it mattered in the overall scheme of things. That’s the trouble I see with many salespeople. They think only of their sale and not of their job, which is to make a difference for people.”

Off to a great start
Two people who share a little trust and a simple connection mark the beginning of a relationship, says Cathcart. You and your prospect start with a simple exchange of information about your needs, and if you approach the prospect with the right attitude, things may snowball from there.

“The first thing we must do to cultivate a customer relationship is assume up front that this will be a long-term, ongoing relationship – that we are not there to make a sale, that making a sale is simply incidental to what we do,” Cathcart explains. “We are there to make a difference.”

Once you have the right attitude, communicate your intentions to your prospects to earn their trust. Remember – what you say counts, but what you do counts much more. To nurture a relationship in its infancy, make sure your actions don’t raise any red flags that make buyers doubt your sincerity.

“It’s so important to pay attention to how we look, how we act, how we sound,” emphasizes Cathcart, “so we don’t send mixed messages. For instance, if you tell prospects you care about them but don’t listen to them, it’s obvious that your concern was just good lingo, not genuine feeling. But when you show someone through your behavior that you care, they may invest more in the relationship.”

The trust factor
At the heart of every relationship lies trust, which Cathcart defines as “the dynamic that exists when two people see no threat from each other and see potential benefit from being better connected.” He explains that parents trust a child more and more to cross the street alone as the child shows more ability to do so, and prospects’ trust grows as they perceive your growing ability to meet their expectations. Of course, as he points out, your level of perceived ability depends on how well you really understand them.

“You can do a totally honest, highly professional job for someone,” he explains, “and absolutely meet all the requirements of the sale and still not gain their trust because you didn’t understand their meaning. They may tell you how to do something technically, but emotionally they may want you to do it in a certain way. If you don’t attend to those emotions, you don’t get the trust. You must deal with individuals so they feel safe, protected and well cared for.”

For those times when your buyers’ emotional needs are an enigma to you, a little sleuthing can help you solve the mystery. By taking an interest in the people you call on and knowing what to be curious about, you can earn trust in exchange for your good intentions and honest efforts.

“First, find out about your prospects – what’s going on in their lives and businesses, where they want to go next, what they are concerned about,” Cathcart says. “Make yourself a list of questions that apply to many different situations and practice asking people you know, so it feels natural and automatic to wonder about the right things.”

Those “right” things, according to Cathcart, are the ones near and dear to your buyers’ hearts. Instead of making small talk over photos, trophies or knickknacks decorating their offices, focus on the concerns that weigh heavily on them. Address an urgent problem and present a solution, Cathcart says, and “you get a much bigger sale than you were going to get otherwise.”

On the flip side, he also says that if your product or service isn’t right for the buyer, honesty is your best policy: “The right frame of mind for approaching a sale is, ‘I have a responsibility to help this person do the right thing – the right thing for them.’ Salespeople need to recognize that they have to eat tomorrow as well as today. If they make a sale today that hurts them tomorrow because they sold too much or oversold for the need, they may destroy long-term possibilities by considering only short-term needs.”

The care and feeding of your relationship
Trust may be the most critical relationship success factor, but it isn’t the only one. Aside from trust, relationships thrive on honest communication and commitment from both parties to make the relationship work. The commitment, says Cathcart, “starts with the salesperson, because clients have no reason to be committed yet.”

Along with doing what’s right to grow relationships, you have to avoid doing what’s wrong. According to Cathcart, indifference – even perceived indifference – is the number-one relationship killer.

Cathcart blames epidemic indifference not so much on salespeople as on compensation plans. Many companies show salespeople the money only when they make sales and don’t reward them specifically for repeat transactions or for nurturing relationships.

Of salespeople who sell just for the moment, Cathcart observes, “That’s a good strategy if you are building a sales job but not if you are building a career. Salespeople must spend a portion of the day prospecting, a portion selling and a portion servicing accounts. But they must also spend time on creative ways to stay in touch with clients and show they care.

“We’ve been taught for years how to up sell, but we haven’t been taught how to up serve, how to do things that don’t always increase the size of the transaction but that absolutely increase the depth of the satisfaction,” Cathcart argues. “Businesses should be like Secret deodorant – pH balanced. PH, profits high, and pH, people happy. If you think business is just about generating revenue, you may have high profits, but your customers probably won’t be very happy and profits will drop. If you believe it’s about making people happy, you may have happy people, but your profits may suffer. You have to devote time to both the human side of the equation (happy people) and the business side (high profits).”

Taking relationships to new heights
Just as a tree’s many roots anchor it to the ground, many connections to your customer company anchor you to it. Limiting your contacts within the customer company to just one is risky – if your contact is fired or leaves, you lose your one connection to the company. To help you prevent such calamities, Cathcart prescribes more complex relationships with more than one contact.

“You expand and grow a relationship by extending the number of contacts and connections within that company,” he says. “With an individual, you extend the number of levels and areas of that person’s life in which you have an impact or a connection.” Cathcart, for example, says that an upscale hotel company once asked him to take an hour to share some selling ideas with its salespeople. First, however, he asked the director of sales for more information about the sales team, their market strategy and the hotel chain’s unique advantages. As a result, Cathcart delivered a customized talk that so impressed the director of sales that Cathcart ended up working for all the branch offices.

To follow his example, get on a first-name basis with your contact, but don’t stop there. Meet and greet the CEO, a few sales managers or some other company executives and by all means, get personal. Ask about their families, activities and interests, and look for something the two of you have in common beyond your business relationship. A round of golf or some other nonwork activity helps you and your contact get to know each other in a more friendly, less formal way. These more abundant, more intimate connections with buyers, Cathcart says, increase your ability and desire to solve their problems.

“I believe society advances based on connections and solutions,” he says. “The more we connect with people, the more we consider them part of our lives and are likely to keep in touch with them. When we think about the future, they are in the back of our minds as we plan. Also, the better we are connected, the more solutions we can access. Take the Internet, for instance. The more you can instantly and easily communicate with people, the more opportunities you see to provide solutions to them.”

As technology levels the playing field for companies big and small, good selling becomes less about products and more about people. Before you expect a transaction, take time for interaction. Talk with your buyers, build rapport with them and earn their trust along with your sale. As a result, you can say to your buyers what Cathcart says everyone making an honest, helpful sale can say: “You’re better off because you know me. I’m better off because I know you. And the world’s better off because the two of us connected.”

Based on an interview for Selling Power Live! by Lisa Ferrari.