“It is essential to align expectations for growth, efficiency and effectiveness with your partner, with your client partner, or with your business relationship in advance, so that that doesn’t put you in the risk of losing this client.” – Natasha D’Souza in today’s Tip 1147
How do you build strong relationships?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Natasha!
Natasha D’Souza on LinkedIn
Heels to Deals: How Women are Dominating in Business-to-Business Sales
Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today our weeklong celebration of women in sales continues with Natasha D’Souza. Natasha’s career spans almost 8 years in Sales and Sales Training. She believes that appreciating small wins and building teams with passion and compassion go a long way. Over the years, she has grown and groomed multiple sales teams to hone a winning mindset. Here she is:
Natasha D’Souza: Hi, I’m Natasha, and here is my sales tip. This one is on relationships. Sales is actually a business of relationships and not transactions. In fact, the currency of sales is actually trust and in order to become a trusted advisor, you are going to have to really think differently. The differentiator in all of these conversations is actually you, which is why it breaks the myth that anybody can actually sell. That’s true, anybody can actually sell. But if you realize that every profession today or every job today is actually a sales job, the one to understand more is that every job is actually a people job and hence the efficiency of your conversations are based on how strong your relationships are, not portfolios. However, here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re building relationships.
Never assume that they don’t need validation from time to time. We tend to forget to service some of our top partners across the board, assuming that we have really strong relationships and a lot of these are actually based on trust-based reporting and recommendations. And a big part of this actually comes from the trusted advisor themselves. However, it is absolutely essential to always keep things either on pen on paper or on an email or a format that’s consumable or report. So never take that for granted.
The second is that use or leverage these conversations or these relationships to actually seriously go deeper into their business. What is the point of actually building a relationship if you aren’t able to deeply understand their business and understand why your product is so meaningful in that business journey? So use these conversations to really understand why or where your product stands in the criticality of the transaction.
The next would be to leverage your experience to push the benchmark of excellence every single time. What tends to happen is that if you have long, strong relationships with partners, you tend to assume that the benchmark is the same as it were today. But the truth is that the expectation keeps going further away from you. So it would be ideal for you to set these benchmarks higher earlier on. That could be a revenue benchmark, an efficiency benchmark, an operative benchmark, but something for you to chase that you have already aligned with your partner in the beginning.
Since sales is such a beautiful profession of Art and Science, the qualitative and the quantitative, it is essential to align expectations for growth, efficiency and effectiveness with your partner, with your client partner, or with your business relationship in advance, so that that doesn’t put you in the risk of losing this client. If they are actual Brand Ambassadors and if they do invest this kind of time and energy into building their brand with you, they’ve actually increased their belief of you believing their product. So here’s my few tips on maintaining strong relationships.
Scott Ingram: To get your hands on a copy of Heels to Deals, the book that Natasha and over 2 dozen other sales women contributed to, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1147 and we’ll have links for you there. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales. Thanks for listening!