Your business might be complicated, but your customer isn’t.
Whether your customers are individuals or enterprises, and whether they buy online or offline, you’re still selling to human beings. So no matter what or how you sell, there’s a direct correlation between your personal connections and your sales success.
As the saying goes: “It’s more important who you sit next to than what you do.” In other words, the secret to increasing sales effectiveness isn’t finding complicated, impressive ways to explain what you do. It’s getting to know and understand your customer, which shouldn’t be hard, considering you’re a human being too.
People Do Business with People
It doesn’t matter if your business is ultrahigh tech or low tech, the most important buying decisions customers make are still based on personal relationships. There’s tons of research out there, all with the same findings: People spend money with salespeople and companies they like and trust—or those who have been referred by people they like and trust.
One way companies derail trusting relationships with customers is with overcomplicated sales and marketing processes and terminology. Buyers don’t really care whether we’re B2C or B2B, nor do they understand or care about all the complex jargon we use to describe our markets and products. They only care whether they can trust us to sell them something they actually want or need.
One Human Being to Another
That’s why I love the new term “H2H.” Bryan Kramer explains the significance is his Social Media Today article—“There Is No More B2B or B2C: There Is Only H2H (Human to Human).”
Here’s a snippet:
The fact is that the lines are so far blurred now between the two marketing segments [B2B and B2C] that it’s hard to differentiate between the two anymore. We all need to think like the consumers we are, putting ourselves in the mindset of the buyer instead of trying to speak such an intensely sophisticated language full of acronyms and big words, in order to sound smarter.
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So, this is how I see it:
Businesses do not have emotion. People do.
People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
People want to feel something.
People want to be included.
People want to understand.
Bottom line: Relationships still power sales. That’s why selling by referral gets better results than any other business-development method that exists, with a conversion rate of more than 50 percent.
So make it easy for your customers to choose you. Get those referral introductions!
Connect with No More Cold Calling
Follow Joanne on Google+ or Twitter @ReferralSales, or connect on LinkedIn and Facebook.
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How do you leverage relationships for sales success?
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