Relationship-based Selling Is NOT for the Faint-of-Heart!
Closing business that hinges on high trust requires a different approach from transactional selling. It takes more heart...
Unlike transactional selling, relationship-based selling requires skills to cultivate trust, connection & relevance with clients... and doing it better than the next (equally smart) sales guy!
🔸 “I’ve been selling for years. How hard can it be?”
I met Alexandre in a sales course I was running at one of the big banks. It focused on helping seasoned professionals shift, mid-career, into Trusted Advisory selling.
Alexandre had been selling for over a decade. He had come from a very successful role in Brokerage. But when he realized that his success in that position came at the cost of his peace of mind and his family life (it happens), he decided to move into high net worth advisory.
“How hard can it be?” he asked himself. Given his years of experience selling, Alexandre was banking on an easy transition.
🔸 “Wow. This takes time… and attention!”
“It’s not easy,” he confided to me. It was the second morning of our two-day program. “It takes way more time than I expected. And I’m just not that practiced at so much deep conversation with clients!”
What Alexandre was realizing is just how different Brokerage sales is from Trusted Advisory sales. His former role required that he be first — and fast — at order-taking; quick to source and implement plug-and-play, commoditized solutions. He “knew” his clients from highly social outings to ball games and rounds of golf. But since his clients’ needs were not so much complex as fast-paced, his competitive advantage boiled down to timely reaction, speed of transaction, and best-price with quickest turn-around.
By contrast to this reactive, transactional approach to client engagements as a Broker, his new role as a Trusted Advisor required Alexandre to adopt a more proactive, relationship-based sales approach. He’d need to clock in more “CFT” (client face-time) in order to cultivate deeper personal connections, engage in more substantive discussions on business challenges, and collaborate with his firm’s internal Subject Experts in genuine problem-solving to identify the best solution that leveraged the firm’s extensive capabilities.
After that, he’d need to present in ways that could effectively differentiate himself, the team, and the solution they’d customized for the client. Oh yeah, and… the competition appeared to be equally smart and motivated, and their solutions appeared to be equally worthy!
Well… this approach to client relationships was certainly a far cry from the grab-the-call-first approach he had mastered in his previous position.
🔸 What’s Different
Not everyone can sell in a relationship based context. It’s not for the faint of heart.
It requires a thoughtful, strategic approach to questioning that allows for the client to go in unexpected directions when telling their story.
It means knowing how to track information that appears, at first, to be irrelevant but then to realize that for that client, it’s extremely relevant.
It takes an ability to listen deeply, picking up on what the client is saying, but also getting what they aren’t saying (or don’t even know to say).
🔸 What’s Really Different
Perhaps hardest of all, relationship-based selling requires you to enter into client discussions with a sincere intention to be of service. Anything shy of that will be quickly detected (and suspected) by the client. Anything shy of that undermines trust and cultivates a lens of doubt through which the client perceives you, your team, your firm, your advice, and your services.
It begins with a willingness to truly set aside personal agendas (like “I gotta hurry and close this deal to make my quota!”) and biased thinking (“I’ve heard this before. This client is just like all my other clients.”).
🔸 Notice This
These become distractions that cause the sales rep to operate in pushy, ham-handed ways:
Rushing through questions — This can cause the Trusted Adviosr to ask too few questions, and then to turn the whole “discovery” process into a self-serving, fact-fishing expedition designed to get just the details they need to justify a foregone conclusion about what to sell this person;
Listening at a superficial level — You can’t listen closely to your client if you’re pre-occupied with listening to yourself fixate on how to get the sale!
Becoming defensive in the face of objections — Rather than seeing client objections as signs that they’re trying to buy and digging deeper to hear what the unmet need is behind their words, you double down and re-explain why you’re “right”!
🔸 What Became of Alexandre?
In our discussion on that second morning of the class Alexandre told me that he had to learn how to be in a relationship context. He recognized how important it was for his career. But there was more at stake for him than the new sales role.
Part of his move to a different position was because he had become estranged from his eldest son. They’d not spoken in over six months. But then Alexandre said this:
“I realized when I was practicing listening with my partner yesterday in class, I really wasn’t listening. And I thought that’s what happened with my son and me. So I called him… and we talked. Well, he talked. I listened.”
🔸 Take Aways (IMHO)
Relationship-based selling means being good at relationships!
You need to appreciate (really, really appreciate) that authentic connection and business relevance are key to whether or not a client will do business with you.
It takes skill. And skill takes practice.