I first bought The Relationship Edge: The Key to Strategic Influence and Selling Success
Intellectually, I guess I’ve wanted it to be true. After all, it seems to me that consultative selling is a meritocracy while relationship selling is a popularity contest. You truly have to know your stuff to make it to the top of CS, but it seems that any natural-born schmoozer and back-slapper can succeed at RS. Those of us on the introverted end of the scale tend to take offense at that.
On the other hand, why not work on being good and popular? When I look objectively at my own sales success, more opportunities have come my way from established relationships and referrals than from cold-calling. It’s much easier to be consultative when people are ready and willing to engage in a conversation, and relationships open the necessary doors.
Acuff’s book actually provides a bridge or middle ground between the two camps. On the one hand, he says that relationships are everything in business. His main premise is that the quality and the richness of our relationships determines in many ways the quality and richness of our lives. But then he spans the divide by adding that creating valuable business relationships is not about making friends, although often lasting friendships will result. It’s not just about making connections either. We all have hundreds of connections that will never turn into valuable business relationships.
What is a valuable business relationship? He begins by describing six levels of relationship, which he calls the Relationship Pyramid. At level 1, they don’t know who you are, and at level 6, you have a valuable business relationship, which he defines as those with AIR: Access, Impact and Results.
Access: will they take your calls and respond promptly to your emails?
Impact: You have an opportunity to influence their actions
Results: They do things proactively to help you succeed.
How do valuable business relationships help you sell? As Acuff says, when trust and rapport are strong, selling pressure will always seem weak; when trust and rapport are weak, any selling pressure will seem too strong.
All of us have a number of Level 6 relationships which have developed naturally in our work and personal lives. Acuff shows us how to implement a mindset and process to substantially increase our natural “hit rate” and grow the number of Level 6 relationships.
Mindset: You have to think that relationships are important, and that you have something of value to add to others. The paradox of building relationships is that you have to be genuinely interested in others as people—not as contacts or connections—and later the benefits will come. The best advice in the book is to envision that everyone you talk to has the following words tattooed on their forehead: “Make me feel important.”
Process: Mindset is useless without a process to develop relationships and to turn those relationships into measurable results. The process is pretty simple. First you list your most important relationships, assess where each one is on the pyramid, and then create a plan to move each relationship to higher levels. You do this by increasing your touches, learning more about them as people, taking actions that will make their lives better in some ways, etc.
To learn more about people, the book suggests a list of 20 questions. I don’t agree with all of them, and I won’t remember them all anyway, so the best thing to remember is FORM: Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Motivation. Of course, the danger with lists like this is that some people will become determined to get the answers from all their contacts and will go about it in a formulaic and self-defeating way. Acuff shares ways to ask the questions properly and weave them naturally into the conversation.
My own take after reading Acuff’s process is a bit different. The first thing I’ve done is turn the pyramid upside down, because it’s really a funnel. Just like a sales funnel, suspects enter at the top and closed deals emerge from the bottom, once they have gone through a codified and systematic selling/buying process. This way, you can set goals for new contacts to put in the funnel, have measurable events that will indicate objectively what the quality of a relationship is, and have goals for numbers of level 6 relationships created. At the moment, I am working through what the gates or milestones are at each level, and what are the best tactics for moving a relationship through the funnel.
The one weakness in the book is that it is a bit thin on some of this practical advice. For example, Acuff says you need goals, but his chapter on goal setting is basically the ABCs of SMART goals, with very little practical advice on what some specific goals should be, and what tactics are best at each stage. I would have loved to see a chapter entitled: “50 ways to move people up the pyramid.”
That said, everyone is different, and maybe it’s best that the reader is left to figure out specifics on his own. The important thing is to have the right mindset, make a plan to work through the process, and stick to it. The Relationship Edge can help you with the big picture, and you can fill in the colors that work best for you.
Think about the last time you watched a contestant on a game show. Think about how they behaved as their winnings piled up. Eventually, they got to a point where risking all that money became a pretty difficult decision, right? Sure they could win even more, but they had just as much to lose, and suddenly quitting while they were ahead sounded pretty good, right?
When it comes to high-stakes sales, many buyers think the same way. In ordinary sales, most buyers try to strike a reasonable balance between risks and opportunities. But as the stakes increase, buyers focus more and more on the risks — what they stand to lose – and less on the opportunities — what they stand to gain.
So what does this mean for sales reps looking to cash in on a high-stakes sale? It means playing it safe.
Sales expert Harry Beckwith has taken a close look at high-stakes purchases and found that in these situations, buyers aren’t looking for the best option. They’re looking for the safest option.
Beckwith calls it the “The Principle of Looking for Good Enough.” Here’s what he advises to salespeople facing high-stakes buyers:
“Forget looking like the superior choice. Make yourself an excellent choice, then eliminate anything that would make you a risky choice.”
Instead of putting time and energy into reaching perfection, focus on understanding what’s on the line for your buyer. What do success and failure look like for them? What are the consequences for the buyer in the event this project goes south? Knowing the answers to those questions is the first step to succeeding in a high risk sale.
Once you know the stakes for the buyer, it’s up to you to position your product or service as the safest option available. Other solutions may be more prestigious or look nicer than what you offer, but if you can demonstrate that you offer the best chance of success, you’ll go a long way toward alleviating a buyer’s concerns.
How can you position yourself as the safest option in the eyes of the buyer? Consider these talking points:
- You understand the buyer’s risks
- Your experience and industry knowledge will help ensure success
- Your product/service has a long track record of success
- You have contingency plans for problems that might come up
- You will tell buyers the truth, not what they want to hear
By recognizing what’s on the line for your buyer and positioning your product as the safest option available, you’ll vastly improve your odds of walking away having won a huge sale.
Today’s guest post is brought to you by Michael Boyette. Michael is the Executive Editor of the Rapid Learning Institute Selling Essentials e-learning site and Editor of the Top Sales Dog Blog. Contact Michael via e-mail at topsalesdog@rapidlearninginstitute.com or connect via Twitter
Of the many thousands of sales presentations delivered daily, only a select few rise to the level of STRATEGIC sales presentations. What’s the difference?
Strategic sales presentations fit the following profile:
Game changers: Ordinary presentations are fine for ordinary decisions, such as renewing a contract with an existing supplier. Strategic presentations require important decisions, such as changing the way the customer does business to respond to fresh challenges, opportunities, or risks.
New insights: One way to make a presentation “game-changing” is for the salesperson to bring new insights to the client, perhaps about a problem they don’t realize they have. They challenge the client’s view of the world, and this requires a lot of research, and, yes, courage.
Impact: The impact of decisions made as the result of a strategic sales presentation is usually huge from a financial, strategic and even personal point of view. For the client, this means that many different units or functions are involved, which means that the message has to appeal to a wider range of interests. For the salesperson, the outcome may mean the difference between a successful year or a bust.
Unique: Ordinary presentations are usually canned scripts that use off-the-shelf slides and apply to everyone. They practically scream: “to whom it may concern.” Strategic presentations are unique to those people in the room at that particular time, for their particular situation.
Strategic context: Strategic presentations are not stand-alone events that can be plugged in whenever the client agrees to meet with you. They are an integral element of the salesperson’s account or opportunity plan, and therefore they have a clear purpose and intended outcome for the seller and the buyer.
Shaping the conditions: Because they are part of an ongoing strategy, what the salesperson does before the presentation to shape the conditions for success is at least as important as what he or she says and does during the presentation.
It’s just a start
This may seem ironic and possibly self-defeating coming from someone who makes a living selling training to organizations, but if you’re in sales and depend on your employer to be the principal source of your sales education, you may be in serious trouble.
You can be a good salesperson with the training you get—maybe even very good. But you can’t be exceptional, and you definitely can’t be great, if you don’t take charge of your own education and lifelong learning. It’s pretty simple: if you’re getting training that your employer provides, so is everyone else.
I had an interesting discussion with Anthony Iannarino yesterday, and coincidentally his article this morning reinforced an idea that came into my mind during that discussion. We were talking about our shared passion for military history, and one of the points that came out of our talk is that most if not all of the great generals and leaders were self-taught. Marshall and Eisenhower and Patton were sent to professional schools throughout their careers, but they also read incessantly, and they studied military history, taking careful notes, visiting battlefields to see for themselves how and why those who came before them made the decisions that they did.
Salespeople also need to study their craft and their profession. When was the last time you read a sales book? If it was recently, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. When was the last time you took careful notes, maybe compared what you read to a different book, and applied what you learned? And, it’s really not about just sales books. When was the last time you read a business book, or any other book that expanded your horizons just a little bit, maybe helped you to spot a new way to approach a particular sales opportunity?
When you attend a training class, does your workbook join all the others you have packed away somewhere gathering dust, or do you personally take charge of applying one or two or more nuggets? If you paid for a golf lesson, you know it would be wasted if you didn’t go out and practice the new skill immediately and consistently, yet so many salespeople treat the training they get as an event that is over when it is over.
We’re told the best salespeople bring fresh insights to their customers. Guess what: if everyone is getting the same training in those same ideas, how fresh are your insights going to be?
What does self-education do for you? It can make you better at your current position, but what it really does is prepare you for higher positions. It will give you the knowledge and confidence to interact with higher level people in the customer’s organization, or even in your own. It will mark you out for advancement. In the 1890s, British military officers posted to India led a relaxed life: a little training in the morning, polo in the late afternoons, and alcohol and naps during the hottest hours of the day. Except for one young subaltern, a recent graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Knowing that his education was woefully deficient, the young officer sent his mother a shopping list of books, books which he studied during those afternoon hours when everyone else was boozing or sleeping. He didn’t let his studies get in the way of everything else that mattered; he was one of the stars of his regiment’s polo team, and he certainly was not a teetotaler, but Winston Churchill had other plans for his life, and he knew that he had to take charge of his own education if he was to rise above his ordinary career prospects.
Of course, the 1890s were different than today. At that time, the world was about to change dramatically in ways that people could not foresee. Change was the order of the day, although folks back then really did not know what was about to hit them. Today, change is still the order of the day, and the only difference is that we know that next year, or 10 years from now will be very different than today. So, we have even less excuse to avoid taking responsibility for our own education. As Tom Friedman says in today’s New York Times column, in today’s hyperconnected world, “…the old average is over.” Things you take for granted become obsolete faster, so what you learn early in your life and career is not enough to last your lifetime.
Does self-education matter? Hell, yes, it does! When everyone else has great products and slick materials, the only differentiator that you can control is your knowledge and skill, and that’s the differentiator that customers will pay to get. What are you doing to add value to yourself and your customers?
