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

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.

Thank you for reading this post on building customer loyalty and relationship selling. Do you have any advice on how to build customer satisfaction for sales success? Please share your tips and comment below!

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