Sounding as good as you are!

Relationship selling is building up trust so that you are believed to align your goods or services to meet customer need. It is often done very well by people who would be appalled by the idea that they were selling at all. The opposite is often known as box selling, where the need is probably absent and the idea is to shift as much product by any means possible (“Cor blimey, darling, have I got a special offer for you!”).

But what if you are faced with someone who appears to grasp “faster” and “slower”, “bigger” and “smaller” but is rather vague when assessing the worth of additional upload/download speed or the joy of more megapixels? It can be hard to trust the customer to understand the product and begins to feel like trying to sell a black box.

One major telecoms company appears to have decided it is box selling. If you contact them, or more frequently, they contact you, after a perfunctory question or two, the solution always appears to be to upgrade to the top priced package they have on offer. Only if you put up resistance do they come back to securing your continued custom with something you might want or use. It feels as if they have decided that profits from this approach are worth the irritation and loss of trust engendered- and anyway, who expects customer loyalty nowadays?

It would be sad though if it was another scenario. That the company did value customer loyalty- if only because customers are cheaper to keep than acquire- and had staff who were very much aligned to customer need. Nevertheless, they had come to sound as if they were box selling. Skilled and enthusiastic staff with the insight to identify need can run straight to solution without taking the customer with them. The latter is a separate skill. It is not technical knowledge alone that is required but the ability to accompany the customer on a journey. The buyer may not know what product they want or how the black box will solve the problem exactly, but they usually know what they are trying to do, and sometimes even more strongly, what they do not want.

Accompanying them on their journey when you think you already have the solution needs a degree of patience. It may need some flexibility- if talking to the Head of Marketing and the IT Director in the same conversation for example. It certainly needs a clear understanding of how relationships work to benefit both parties, and practical skill in how to manage them. That is why, whatever your technical area of expertise, at Cracking Conversation our core blocks of Questioning, Listening and Silence are fundamental to our approach on this subject.

#selling skills #cracking conversation #trusted advisor