Customers, Selling Modes, and Measurability

In any sales situation, you use one of three selling modes as the vehicle to seek the metrics and details for the questions highlighted in the Eileen and Bob examples. The modes (in order of least productive and desired to most productive and coveted) are brinkmanship, courtship, or relationship selling. Because the courtship mode comprises both the relationship and brinkmanship modes, they will be discussed in the following order: relationship, brinkmanship, and courtship. Each one influences the amount and depth of details you gather. These details will ensure that your sales strategy drives your selling tactics.

Relationship Selling

The salesperson with the most long-term (that is, loyal) customers wins. You win because you made it to the coveted third and highest stage of a salesperson's career, which is relationship selling. You enjoy the rewards of your professional and personal relationships with customers. Years of meeting or exceeding customers' expectations will earn their loyalty.

Purchase orders become foregone conclusions. Customers have confidence that you listen to and act upon what they say and always put their best interests first. The benefits of relationship selling are huge: Customers willingly share their needs, deadlines, competitive data, decision-making process, and budgets with you. There are no secrets among trusted allies.

You answer each other's questions with vast amounts of valuable (that is, measurable) details. Everyone knows that by sharing information you can select the best solutions. You coach each other on the best way to make sales happen. With patience reserved only for long-term business partners, customers help to fine-tune your proposals until the right needs-solutions-price combinations shake out. They take your advice on how to sell proposals to their organizations, knowing they will receive fair market pricing. You can count on them to return with signed proposals. Surprises or disappointments do not often happen with long-term customers.

You can even measure the value of relationship selling. Review what differential they paid for your relationship when competitors offered similar products. Past surveys suggest somewhere between a 5 percent and 8 percent premium. You will find that the measurable benefits of Column 2 justify a much larger price differential than the 5 to 8 percent that customers are willing to pay for your relationships. Measurable benefits are always worth more financially to your customers than your personal relationship is. The key is to motivate customers to understand both the value of your personal relationship and the value of the measurable benefits you provide. You now have earned a long-term customer.

Furthermore, relationships are a two-way street. At what point do you recommend competitors' products because they provide more value in a given situation? You do so only when customers have measurable benefits that connect to competitors' unique strengths (products only they provide). After all, you would rather lose an opportunity than a customer. Do not worry; when you choose your market segments as outlined in Chapter 3, that occurrence will be rare. After all, the selling methods in this book are not concerned with becoming a referral service for competitors.

In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, you also see the significant benefits of acknowledging to customers where your strengths lie—and where they do not. In return, appreciative customers do not ask you to work up proposals they will not seriously consider. In relationship selling, you and your customer place a strong premium on not wasting each other's time. You will see in these chapters that the value differential between yours and the competitors' measurable benefits—when known—can break down the barriers of mainly personal customer relationships.

Understandably, long-term customers demand and consume a lot of your time. Yet, they are your best customers because they compensate (higher profits) you for the time you invest in solving their problems. They are the basis of the so-called 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your (long-term) customers. Just make sure they consume less than 80 percent of your time so you get a fair return on your investment (more on this point in later chapters).

You cherish relationship selling. You probably welcome the day when the repeat business from long-term customers means you never have to make another cold call (other than out of boredom) to exceed quota. However, if relationship selling is the prize, what are the other two stages of selling you must go through to win it? These stages are brinkmanship and courtship selling.

Brinkmanship Selling

Brinkmanship selling occurs with new prospects. It is the most challenging type of selling. You must uncover many unknowns while trying to establish rapport with strangers (not unlike the singles' bar scene). Adding to your difficulty, you have only about fifteen minutes in which to make it happen.

You attempt to discover the prospect's "pain," or at least the prospect's sense of urgency, deadlines, competition, decision makers, and budgets. Your goal is to obtain enough specifics to qualify or disqualify the prospect as quickly as possible. You do not want to waste time presenting products or services that might not satisfy the prospect's purchasing requirements or your pricing levels.

Conversely, prospects also want to determine whether you can help their situation. Therefore, they seek to gather product or company information such as prices, delivery dates, technical specifications, and warranties. The cat-and-mouse game begins. You ask qualifying questions; they ask product questions. You are both careful about how much information you provide each other. You treat selling as a race that you win when you gather information that is beneficial to you faster then you give out information that is detrimental to you. You delay giving out prices until you know their budgets. Prospects delay giving out budgets until they know your prices.

The cat-and-mouse game continues until price or budget amounts surface. You bring each other to the brink. You then see if anyone blinks. The call either continues with some chance of success or someone mercifully ends it.

As is so often the case with first meetings, it is anybody's guess how they will end up. Do you walk away with another meeting, a follow-up call in six months, send more literature, a purchase order, or is it a waste of time? If you decide it is best to wait for the prospect to be fired or quit before you try again, you can safely assume the sales call did not go well.

Courtship Selling

Courtship selling occurs with new buyers who do not yet qualify as long-term customers. It is the most confusing type of selling because you deal with customer schizophrenia. Sometimes these new customers act like long-term customers (and share details)—and sometimes they act like new and fickle prospects (and clam up). Courtship selling is a blend of brinkmanship and relationship selling. Your challenge is to know which selling mode you need to use and when.

Since they just bought something from you, initially you treat them as long-term customers and use relationship selling, exchanging information freely. You stay in this selling mode until you lose a sales opportunity to a competitor. You then shift to brinkmanship selling with all its challenges. Eventually, customers either evolve into long-term customers or regress into prospects again. If you are willing to let another salesperson handle their account, it is safe to say you do not consider them to be potential long-term customers.

Note

A common mistake is to evaluate your selling skills by your successes with long-term customers. Using the relationship selling model, which depends on time, past results, and personal bonds, will not work effectively on new customers and prospects when those factors do not apply.