Sell Like a Pro, How To Build Repeat Business

By Carole Nicolaides
Posted Monday, August 23, 2004

A lot of people are scared when it comes to selling- especially young entrepreneurs that are eager to succeed with their ventures. Nothing is more frightening than the idea of selling your own services. The good news is that one of the most effective and sustained methods of selling is creating relationships and shared partnerships with your clients. It becomes a give and take relationship, a mutual exchange of favors. It is important to have your customers view you as their partner instead of their vendor.

Relationship selling is the most effective and possibly the only sales strategy that you need. Relationships come naturally outside the sales arena. They can be the same way while you’re selling, too. This in turn alleviates much of the pain and frustration that is associated with closing a deal.

Creating relationships means going beyond just looking at a potential prospect and closing a sale. What do you think is easier - gaining a new customer or selling additional services to an existing customer? You see where I ‘m heading? Building relationships means you need to go on and keep that relationship alive even after the sale is closed. The key to this successful strategy is to keep your customers excited about working with you again.

People, will naturally want to work with you when they see you as a valuable partner. If your customers see you as someone that cares for their business, they will be more likely accept most of the new services that you want to introduce to them.

So how do you build relationships with clients? Well, first of all you need to CARE about them. Your clients do not care how much you know or how much you have achieved in your life. However, they do care about of how much concern you have for them. Caring about someone and expressing it in a genuine way goes beyond just knowing what your customers need. Many sales people and business people know what their customers need in regard to products and services. However, they forget to dig deeper. Consider who your customers really are. Listen to their stories about their business, purpose, vision and desires.

Seek opportunities to add value to their existence. By doing this you are adding value to both the person and the organization that they serve in. This is not as difficult as you may think. Just keep alert and notice their challenges. Provide them with an honest observation and a suggested recommendation with no intent of selling. By doing this, you will earn their trust and respect, again, because you care.

All the extra things that you do for a customer are important and count for building a trustful relationship. Once trust is built and enforced, the sales will come naturally.

Some practical tips to remember:

1. Approach your customers with the intent of helping them. Form a collaborative partnership; understand the difference of helping them versus selling them a service that you think they need. Become a partner with your customer. Make it clear to them that your success is based on their success. Once they understand this, they will be comfortable recommending you to others.

2. Listen and ask questions that will help you understand not only the things that they tell you explicitly, but also the underlying things that they have on their minds. Ask simple questions such as “what do you mean by that”, “help me understand what do you really want to achieve with this new project”, “how is this new project going to help you in meeting your next quarter’s objectives”?
Be very open-minded. Don’t attach what YOU ultimately want them to buy to your perception. Suspend your own judgment of what is good for them and focus on true listening. Amazingly, by doing this exercise you will see that you will also be able to offer additional services from your business. Identifying the areas that you can help in is an invaluable experience

3. Always be honest. If you cannot help, refer your clients to someone that can. However stay in the loop. Be part of the solution, show interest, even if you are not providing a direct service to them. Do not abandon them once you realize that you cannot help them first hand.

4. Celebrate wins with your customers. If you see that your customers are doing well with something acknowledge them, praise them, express how proud you are of their success and how grateful you are that you know them. All people like sincere praises. Praise selectively though – otherwise you may appear to be a “smooth talker” who’s words become meaningless.

5. Offer Occasional Pro Bono Work- By doing this, and setting upfront your expectations, you are given the opportunity to demonstrate your services to potential clients. If you feel uncomfortable giving work away free-of-charge, then consider offering a money back guarantee to first-time customers.

6. Build repetitive customer base by constantly adding new services. If you pay special attention to your customers, follow up with them, and observe their success, you will be better at determining what you can do to add to your business.

As you see, all these techniques require one important thing - thinking out of the box. You cannot have your mind attached to how many deals you are going to close that month. You need to look for areas where you can help your existing customers and potential customers and then act accordingly. Calling up a client that you may not know may not be that difficult after all, once you realize that you have something to offer which they really need. Keep working on building relationships with your customers and your sales will soar.

About the Author
Carole Nicolaides is President of Intentional Success Coaching offering Personal Success Coaching, Marketing, Business Planning and Internet Success Consulting to small businesses & large organizations. Subscribe to Carole’s FREE EZine at newsletter@intentionalsuccess.com or visit her at (http://www.intentionalsuccess.com) to book your FREE coaching session.