Building & Maintaining Effective Relationships

In this blog, our Director and speaker, Jonathan Stanger, discusses how to build and maintain effective relationships in order to gain sales success.

Listening to and understanding the needs of our clients is my top priority as Sales Director, It’s what I do, I’m passionate about it. I love nothing more than providing our clients with the wow factor.

I’m often asked about my sales focus and what I find is the key to successful selling. For me, the answer is first and foremost, building effective and lasting relationships within my network. I find many businesses are still making the error of concentrating on transactional business, which offers little long-term profitability.  The relational approach behind my sales focus not only works but is mutually beneficial, so here’s my 3 top tips for building and maintaining effective relationships:

Communication is key

I like to take an early and often approach to communicating with people new to my network. Whether it be by email, phone or social media, keeping in touch with my contacts is a matter of high priority for front of mind awareness, just because I’m not selling to someone now, doesn’t mean I never will. I find LinkedIn is a great tool for introducing myself to someone I’ve recently met or would like to meet, but for me, there is nothing outstanding about a connection request that includes a default message. A great approach to standing out from the crowd is introducing myself using LinkedIn in a personal way, outlining the benefits of making a connection and getting to know me.

Offer before asking

I wouldn’t commit to buying into a product I didn’t know about and nor should my connections. I put emphasis on keeping my contacts up to date and informed with what we’re up to, giving them the ability to get to know us before they need us. To encourage potential partnerships we invest in our potential future clients by hosting complimentary quarterly London Leadership events, our events are the perfect opportunity for contacts to see us in action and preview how we work.

Loyalty does the legwork

Positive word of mouth recommendations are one of the biggest driving forces behind increasing sales; if someone you trust tells you something is fantastic the likelihood is you’ll look into it on their recommendation. Building effective relationships with my entire network, whether I’m selling to them or not, does wonders for a number of the referrals I receive.

Click here to find out more about Jonathan, or to find out more about our development programmes, drop our team an email at enquiries@raisethebar.co.uk.