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Relationship Selling for Sales Success: 3 Keys to Building Customer Loyalty

Sales Success | July 9th, 2012 | No Comments »

The success of a business or a sales career depends on relationships selling and customer loyalty. In today’s competitive market, customers are very difficult and expensive to acquire and they can represent tremendous value to an organization.  In fact, customer satisfaction can be the most valuable single asset that a company can acquire during its lifetime. Your job, no matter where you are in the private sector, is to help your company attract, acquire and keep customers indefinitely.  They make all the difference between success and failure.

Three Keys to Building Customer Loyalty

There are three keys to building customer loyalty. They are all combined and somewhat similar. They are relationship selling, partnering for profit, and consultative selling. They are all ways that you differentiate yourself from anyone else who is attempting to sell the same product or service.

Relationship selling is the core of modern selling strategies and maintaining customer satisfaction.  It is really the key to your long term success. Your ability to develop and maintain long term customer relationships is the key to your success as a salesperson and to your success in business. Relationship selling requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the selling process as they are experienced by your customer.

Relationship is the Most Important Part of Selling

Because of the complexity of most products and services today, especially hi-tech products, the relationship is actually more important than the product.

It comes first. It must be established clearly before you can go on. It is, in fact, the key differentiator between you and your competitors. In many cases, the quality of your relationship with the customer is the competitive advantage that enables you to edge out other competitors who may have products and services that are similar or which are selling at lower prices. In relationship selling, the quality of the trust bond that exists between you and your customers can be so strong that no other competitor can get between you.

Partnering for Profit

The second part of building customer loyalty is the partnering for profit approach to business sales.  When you deal with a business person, you can be sure of one thing: that person thinks day and night about his business.  It is very close to him.  It is dear to his heart.  And if you come in and talk to him and ask him questions about his business, and look for ways to help him run his business better, the customer is going to warm up to you and want to be associated with you and your company.  This approach to partnering in profit with your customer is a key way to differentiate yourself and to building customer loyalty for the indefinite future.

Help in Other Ways

As your customer’s partner, you should always be looking for ways to help and advise your customer on ways to cut costs and improve results in his or her area of responsibility.  You should look for ways to help your customer in non-business areas as well.  You should position yourself as a person who cares about the success of your customer more than anyone else does, and apparently even more than you care about selling your product or service at the present moment.

Consultative Selling

The third key to building customer loyalty is the consulting approach to your dealings with your customer, or what is called consultative selling. When you position yourself as a consultant, you are really positioning yourself to serve your customer as a problem solver. Instead of trying to sell something to your customer, you concentrate all of your efforts and attention on helping your customer solve his problems, achieve his goals, or satisfy his needs.

Customer Satisfaction is Key

The key to building customer loyalty is customer satisfaction. Total quality management has been defined as, “Finding out what the customer wants, and then giving it to him.” There is no mystery to it.

84 percent of all sales in America originate from word of mouth and from customer satisfaction. Almost everything you buy is bought after you have heard someone else say that they bought it and were satisfied. Most of your new customers should come from your satisfied existing customers. A referral to a new customer is worth ten times a cold call. It is 16 times easier to sell a satisfied customer something new than it is to sell something to a brand new prospect. Your commitment and dedication to service your customers in such a way that you keep them for life and build incredible customer loyalty is one of the smartest and most profitable things that you could ever do.

8 Task Management Tips to Stop Procrastinating and Get Things Done

Time Management | June 27th, 2012 | No Comments »

Because procrastination is such a major concern of so many people, tips to help people stop procrastinating have been developed over the years. Here are eight of the most powerful task management tips ever devised to help you get things done and stop procrastinating in your work and personal life. Think about which one of these ideas could be most helpful to you right now, in your current situation.

Task Management Tip #1: Get things done by thinking on paper

Prepare thoroughly if you want to get things done. List every step of the job in advance. Break the job down into its constituent parts before you begin. Simply writing out every detail and thoroughly preparing in advance will help you to stop procrastinating and get things done.

Task Management Tip #2: Be fully prepared

When you sit down to work or to begin a task, make sure that you have everything at hand so that you won’t have to get up or move until the task is done. Being fully prepared is a powerful motivator for staying with the task until it is finished.

Task Management Tip #3: Do one small thing to get started

There is an 80/20 rule that says that the first 20 percent of the task often accounts for 80 percent of the value of that task. This is probably what Confucius meant when he said that, ‘‘A journey of 1,000 leagues begins with a single step.’’ Once you have taken even one small step to start the job, you will stop procrastinating and often find yourself continuing on with the task to completion.

Task Management Tip #4: ‘Salami slice’’ the task

Just as you would never try to eat a whole loaf of salami at once, don’t try to take on all of a job from the start. Sometimes the best way to stop procrastinating and complete a major job is to take a small slice and complete just that piece, just as you would take a single slice of salami and eat it.

When you select a small piece of the task and then discipline yourself to do it and get it behind you, it will often give you the momentum you need to counter inertia, stop procrastinating, and get things done.

Task Management Tip #5: Practice the Swiss cheese technique

Just as a block of Swiss cheese is full of holes, you treat your task like a block of cheese and you punch holes in it. Select a five-minute part of the job and do only that. Don’t worry about the whole job. For example, if you want to write an article or a book, break the task down into small pieces that take an identifiable amount of time to complete and do just one small piece at a time whenever you get a chance.

Many authors begin by writing one page a day. If you are doing research, you can read one article per sitting. Many people write complete books on airplanes, or complete their college degrees with snatches of time between other activities. If you wrote one page a day for a year, you would have a 365-page book by the end of the year.

Task Management Tip #6: Do the task that causes you the most fear or anxiety

Often, it has to do with overcoming the fear of failure or rejection by someone else. In sales, it may be associated with prospecting. In management, it may be associated with disciplining or firing an employee. In relationships, this may have to do with confronting an unhappy personal situation.

In every case, you will be more effective if you deal first with whatever is causing you the greatest emotional distress or fear. Often this will break the logjam in your work and free you up mentally and emotionally to get things done.

Task Management Tip #7: Start your day with the most unpleasant task first

Get it over with and behind you. Everything else for the rest of the day will seem easier in comparison.

A recent study compared two groups of people. One group started an exercise program in the morning. The second group started an exercise program in the evenings after work. The researchers found that the morning exercisers were much more likely to still be in the program six months later. Starting the day with exercise was much more likely to lead to the habit of regular exercise than putting it off until the end of the day when it was easier to make excuses and procrastinate.

Task Management Tip #8: Think about the negative consequences

What will happen to you if this job is not done on schedule? Both fear and desire are great motivators of human behavior. Sometimes you can motivate yourself by the desire for the rewards ofof task management completion. Sometimes you can motivate yourself into action by thinking about the negative consequences and what will happen to you do not get things done as promised.

What do you think about these time management tips? If you know other effective ways to stop procrastinating and get things done, please share and comment below!

5 Ways Self-Made Millionaires and Wealthy People Achieved Financial Freedom

Financial Success | June 25th, 2012 | No Comments »

The way you think about money will determine how much of it you accumulate more than any other factor. Your attitude toward money affects your ability to learn from self-made millionaires and wealth people to achieve financial freedom.

Learning from Self-Made Millionaires

If you are really serious about achieving financial freedom, you will want to know the five main ways that fortunes are made in this country. Number one, top of the list, top of the hit parade throughout the history of America, is self-owned businesses. It is entrepreneurship of all kinds, including in real estate. 74% of self-made millionaires in America, not only in this generation and in this century, but in the last century as well, come from self-owned businesses.

How Wealthy People Start Out

The great majority of wealthy people started businesses and built them from the ground up. In the 19th century, fortunes were built by people like Andrew Carnegie, Jacob van Astor, Thomas Edison, Commodore Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan and others. In the 20th century, especially in the last few years, businesses and fortunes alike have been built by people like Bill Gates, Steve Case, Larry Ellison, Ross Perot and Sam Walton. Each of these people started with nothing but turned into wealthy people by building a business from scratch.

Self-Made Millionaire Start from Where They Are

The second major source of self-made millionaires in America is senior executives. Ten percent of wealthy people and self-made millionaires in America are men and women who have joined large corporations and worked with those corporations for many years. They rose to positions of seniority, were paid extremely well, given stock options, profit sharing and bonuses, and as a result of holding onto the money, they became self-made millionaires and achieved financial freedom.

Success Pays Big Rewards

Richard Eisner of Disney Corporation received a $126 million dollar bonus in a single year. Lee Iacoca of Chrysler Corporation was paid $26.7 million dollars as a bonus in a single year. It’s not hard to become a self-made millionaire when you are making that kind of money.

The Professional Road to Financial Freedom

The third source of self-made millionaires in America is doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Men and women who become very, very good at what they do and rise to the top of their professions achieve financial freedom. The top five percent in every field earn 10 and 20 times as much as the average person in that field.

Sell Your Way to Financial Freedom

The fourth major source of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople and sales consultants. Fully five percent of self-made millionaires are men and women who are the top salespeople in their fields. They never started their own businesses. They never went to college or university to get professional degrees. They just became very good salespeople for their products or services and were paid very good money. The secret was that they then invested the money conservatively and held on to it to achieve financial freedom. 99% of self-made millionaires come from these four categories: self-owned businesses – 74%; senior executive positions – 10%: doctors, lawyers and other professionals – 10%; and salespeople and sales consultants – 5%.

Other Ways to Achieve Financial Freedom

The final one percent of self-made millionaires is made up of all the people in all other areas. This one percent consists of people who have made their money by inventions, in show business, in sports, through authorship of books and songs, lottery winners and inheritances. But these wealthy people make up only one percent of the total.

The bottom line is that there are so many ways for you to become a self-made millionaire that it is almost impossible for you not to achieve this goal if you are really serious about it.

Thank you for reading this article on how to achieve financial freedom by learning from self-made millionaires and wealthy people. Please share this post with your friends and comment below!

HBR Blog Network

Share this with Your CEO

by Tony Schwartz  |   7:50 AM June 18, 2012

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Recently, I was giving a talk to 160 senior executives at a large bank. As part of the talk, I asked them to fill out something we call "The Energy Audit," as a way of assessing how well they aremanaging their own energy. It happened that they had access to individual polling devices, so we were able to aggregate their answers and show them on the screen in the front of the room.

Here is some of what we discovered:

77% said they had trouble focusing on one thing at a time, and felt easily distracted during the day.

80% said they take too little time to think strategically and creatively, and spend too much of their time reacting to immediate demands rather than focusing on activities with long-term value and higher leverage.

54% said they often feel impatient, frustrated or irritable at work, especially when demand gets high.

How surprising is it that leaders with such a profile would make short-sighted and ill-considered decisions? The pictures those numbers paint ought to be alarming.

Nor are these bankers a bunch of outliers. Over the past three years, we've given the same audit to tens of thousands of leaders and managers across dozens of companies in multiple industries and the results have been remarkably consistent - and similar to the bankers above.

We believe the most fundamental explanation is an under-recognized personal energy crisis. Energy, after all, is the capacity to do work. In the face of relentlessly rising demand, fueled by digital technology and the expectation of instant 24/7 responsiveness, employees around the world are increasingly burning down their energy reserves and depleting their capacity.

Consider these further findings from the audit of the bankers above:

82% reported they regularly get fewer than 7-8 hours of sleep and often wake up feeling tired.

70% don't take regular breaks during the day to renew and refuel.

70% eat lunch at their desks, if they eat lunch at all.

65% don't consistently work out.

68% said they don't have enough time with their families and loved ones, and when they're with them, they're not always really with them.

71% take too little time for the activities they most deeply enjoy.

Put simply, these leaders are spending more energy than they're taking in. Do that with money, and you ultimately go bankrupt. Do it with your energy, and you'll eventually be running on empty.

The vast majority of organizations — and CEOs — have failed to fully appreciate the connection between how well they take care of their employees; how energized, engaged and committed those employees are as a result; how well they take care of clients and customers; and how well they perform over time.

So what is the impact, and what steps can leaders take to address this energy crisis?

1. Even small amounts of sleep deprivation — anything less than 8 hours — take a progressive toll on people's ability to sustain attention, which is a sine qua non of both efficiency and quality at any given task.

Don't allow, or at least discourage, early morning or late night calls or meetings.

2. Even with sufficient sleep, human beings aren't designed to work for more than 90 minutes continuously at the highest level of focus. The more continuously we work without a break, the more we deplete our capacity to make rational, reflective decisions.

Normalize real renewal breaks, take them yourself, and encourage people to take them throughout the day. Bolder still, authorize afternoon naps, as a way to drive much higher performance in the subsequent several hours.

2. Eating high-energy foods at frequent intervals — lean proteins and complex carbohydrates at least every three hours — ensures access to a steady level of glucose, which is our most primary source of energy and capacity.

Subsidize healthy foods in cafeterias, provide healthy food at offsites, and encourage people to get out for lunch.

3. Working out is not simply a way to build endurance, strength and better health, it's also a powerful form of mental and emotional renewal and therefore builds capacity across multiple energy dimensions.

Provide fitness facilities, at low cost or no cost, or subsidize outside gym memberships. Hold walking one-to-one meetings.

4. Time with loved ones, and for activities we deeply enjoy, are powerful sources of emotional renewal and fuel positive emotions. The better we feel, the better we perform.

Don't email people at night or on weekends, and don't expect them to email you. If it's urgent, call them, so they don't feel compelled to constantly check their digital devices.

5. Doing one thing at a time, in an absorbed way, is not only more efficient, but also leads to higher quality work.

Encourage your people to set aside times every day for uninterrupted focus — above all by doing the most important thing first every day for 60 to 90 minutes, and then taking a break.

It's in every leader's self-interest to actively encourage employees to care of themselves, and to create cultures that value regular renewal — physically, mentally, and emotionally — as a key component of sustainable high performance.

Success isn't about getting more out of your people. It's about investing more in them.

More blog posts by Tony Schwartz

More on: Managing yourself, Organizational culture, Personal effectiveness

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Conversation Starter: How Intimate Are You?

by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind  |   8:00 AM June 11, 2012

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The root cause of organizational dysfunction is often distance — the distance between leaders who communicate in a top-down fashion and employees who develop a sense of estrangement from those leaders. When that distance remains wide, the work of moving crucial information and key ideas across an organization becomes harder and harder. This gap can grow until it becomes a chasm: As leaders lose touch with their people, they lose the ability to maintain the sort of feedback process that enables organizational effectiveness. They neither truly speak to employees nor hear what employees have to say.

This leadership gap is evident at all manner of organizations. When we surveyed a group of 200 hospital workers in 2009, for example, we asked them to respond to the proposition that their "organization communicates appropriate and relevant information about the organization to employees on a timely basis." Roughly one-fifth of respondents (21%) disagreed with that statement, and one-quarter of them (25%) said that they were "unsure" about it.

We, for our part, are sure about one thing: When it comes to communication, if the people you're trying to reach are "unsure" about what you're telling them, then you're not doing very well. We also know that this problem doesn't just afflict people who work in hospitals. From manufacturing to services, in companies large and small, people frequently report that their leaders fall short as communicators.

To narrow the distance that makes real communication impossible, leaders must learn to exhibit a more intimate presence within their company. By doing so, they can set in motion a virtuous cycle: Greater intimacy will enhance the quality of their communication efforts, and better communication will in turn increase the capacity of people in their organization to work closely together.

Don't let the word "intimacy" throw you. It's just the first element of what we call organizational conversation and the first step toward making your approach to communication more conversational. Intimacy encompasses various ways that leaders work to close the gap between themselves and their employees. (In later posts, we'll touch on the other three elements of this model.)

Here are four conversation-starting ideas that will help you get closer to the people with whom you need to communicate.

1. To learn more, listen better. Leaders who earn a reputation among their people for communicating well don't just say that they listen to employees. Nor do they simply open up a Q&A session at the end of a town-hall meeting and leave it at that. Instead, they create regular, intimately structured occasions when leaders resolve to shut up, and when employees at every organizational level are able to speak up.

2. To have a big impact, meet in a small group. It's a well-known meeting dynamic: The larger the group, the more reluctant some people will be to step forward and speak out. Leaders who want to hear about what's really happening in their company, and to hear from more than just a few "usual suspects," make an effort to meet with people in an up-close-and-personal setting.

3. To build trust, show trust. The main ingredient of intimacy, arguably, is trust. But conversationally adept leaders know that trust runs in two directions. Before they ask employees to trust them, they take steps to demonstrate that they trust employees — by, for example, entrusting employees with potentially sensitive financial information.

4. To be a better communicator, be who you are. One way to get close to employees is to show a willingness to get personal. Leaders who take organizational conversation seriously appreciate the value of authenticity, and they understand that being honest with people sometimes means being vulnerable. They don't hide behind a veil of corporate authority.

The limits of communicating with employees "from on high" are becoming ever more clear. Leaders who want to be effective can't be afraid of conversational intimacy.

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To learn more about these ideas, check out a webinar that Michael Slind will be delivering this week, "Talk, Inc.: How Leading CEOs Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations." ExecSense, publisher of the webinar, will stream it live on Friday, June 15, at 2:30 p.m. EDT, and it will be available via download thereafter.

More blog posts by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

More on: Leadership, Managing people, Organizational culture