The Relationship Advantage
Different client. Different product. Same story.
Sadly, it’s become all too familiar — a valued client telling me his business volume has fallen off because of the pandemic. Like déjà vu, he gave me the painful details: Customers did not want to be sold anything. Furthermore, those who were speaking with him insisted they couldn’t differentiate his product offerings from his competitor’s. To make matters worse, he was tracking an alarming trend of established customers leaving his company at an increasing rate.
My response to his discouragement was heartfelt. I told him how I had seen similar sales declines happening with many of my clients. In fact, due to the sluggish COVID economy, pretty much everyone I coach has experienced a slump. (The lone exception is my mortgage client. They’re experiencing their biggest growth year ever because of low interest rates and refinancing.)
As we discussed my client’s current challenge, he commented on the troubling disconnect between his sales force (the “hunters”) and his customer service team (the “farmers”). I proposed that perhaps his sales model needed to transition in parallel to his business model.
The Exponential Age
Allow me to explain.
Most thought leaders suggest we are transitioning from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, or what I refer to as the Exponential Age. Regardless of what we call it, we are rapidly transitioning away from the Industrial Age. If there’s a silver lining to the current COVID business climate, it’s how it has dramatically pointed out the need for change at an exponentially faster rate.
In The Beginning: Sales 1.0
Remember The Waltons? If you owned the only general store in 50 miles, you didn’t have to be much of a salesman! But those days are long gone. In fact, America’s sales process has gone through three broad transitions.
Initially, we entered the Industrial Age as order-takers. I refer to this stage as Sales 1.0. Back in the day, customers would peruse the huge Sears catalog that was mailed to every home. With no sales assistance or personal interaction with the seller, people would simply pick and purchase from the items listed. In the case of financial services, customers would just walk into the bank on the corner and request a mortgage or loan. When buying automobiles, they visited the nearest dealership and chose a car from the onsite inventory — picking only from models on display in the showroom or sitting on the dealer’s lot.
In the simplistic era of Sales 1.0, the salesperson’s role was basically to answer a few questions about features and then write up the order.
Splitting Up The Roles: Sales 2.0
Around the turn of the century, the sales process shifted from just taking orders into the more consultative environment I call Sales 2.0. The most successful salespeople of this era began presenting themselves as consultants and product experts, providing helpful advice on how features and benefits worked together to solve customer problems. Order-takers (left over from Sales 1.0) struggled during the transition, while those adept in “consultative selling” excelled by blending the skills of presentation plus good questioning plus product positioning.
It was during this period that companies started to split up and differentiate the role of salesperson from the role of customer service rep. The salesperson (the hunter) was primarily rewarded for scouting, pitching, and closing new customers. The customer service rep (the farmer) became responsible for executing the order, while farming the buyer for follow-on orders.
Dividing the consultative sales process into two distinct roles does make logical sense — but has not always proved beneficial for the customer.
This emerging hunter-farmer system had two flaws: First, not having a clearly shared team goal, and second, lacking empathy for the customer’s unique needs. This oversight resulted in a deteriorating customer experience and eroding trust in the company’s ability to consistently deliver results.
Where We Are At Today: Sales 3.0
Fast forward to the year 2020. The evolution to Sales 3.0 includes skills and attributes from the first two stages (1.0 and 2.0), while also including a higher level of customer engagement.
In short, Sales 3.0 is the ability to create an emotional engagement wrapped in a unique customer experience. If I’m going to truly differentiate myself and my company’s product or service, it requires empathy for the customer’s current emotional state. As the saying goes, “walk a mile in the other man’s shoes.”
In today’s fast-changing Exponential world, there are two tracks to sales success — the Transactional Model and The Relationship Advantage.
The Transaction Model is best exemplified by Amazon, where they own 100 percent of the customer experience, utilizing their unique service platform. Amazon teaches the customer how to communicate and conduct business with them in a seamless, low-friction environment. For instance, we can reliably return a product to Amazon without frustration. Mistakes are rare, but even when they mistakenly mis-ship, they typically let you keep the wrong product at no cost. And their model has really paid off. It’s estimated that Amazon processes 300 transactions per second. That’s 27-million transactions per day.
Few of us have the scale or business model to duplicate Amazon’s strategy. Amazon sets the standard for a successful Transaction Model where the sales process and supporting infrastructure is uniquely designed for a Lean execution.
Without question, Amazon has established the high-water mark for the Transaction Model. Trying to compete at their level of competence is a failed strategy. Which means we’re back to selling — and that’s where Sales 3.0 (or to use an emotional description, The Relationship Advantage) acts as a catalyst for growth.
The Relationship Advantage
In essence, The Relationship Advantage (Sales 3.0) creates an emotional connection with your customer, demonstrating and delivering a genuine concern for their wellbeing and success. For better or worse, it’s well documented by research (and personal experience), that we all make emotional purchases. This is obvious when we’re buying a home, a car, or a cute puppy.
However, emotions are also involved in a business transaction.
But here’s the difference: In business, one emotion is by far the most important driver in sales, and we define that emotion as trust.
The Importance of Trust
The customer must trust that your service or product will deliver. During the sales transaction, a good salesperson will convey that trust to every customer, even above the actual product or service! This is why sales can be such a rewarding career — your customers explicitly trust that your product or service will meet their expectations. On the other hand, when the product or service does not deliver, they are once again trusting you and your team to correct the issue.
If you do not have this trust-based emotional relationship, you do not have product differentiation … and the customer will constantly shop around for the lowest price and least amount of friction. I’m willing to bet that your best customers are the ones you have the most solid relationship with. When you have a rapport founded on mutual trust, it feels like you’re on the same team. On the other hand, when you inherit a customer who “thinks transactional,” they’re usually tough to work with.
The first element of The Relationship Advantage is establishing trust. The second element is your company’s unique process.
Your Company’s Unique Process
One of the most powerful ways to build and maintain trust is to provide a reliable, understandable, and simple process that reduces complexity and simplifies the transaction. For example, we all quickly move off websites that are tricky to navigate or poorly designed. Nobody wants to go through an aggravating or confusing experience to watch a video or make a purchase. That’s true of all sales and service processes — the cleaner, the better. Ideally, your simple, understandable process is visually communicated with an informational graphic and further enhanced with a compelling narrative (that is, a picture and a story).
To review, The Relationship Advantage is an emotional connection to your customer, clearly communicated with a compelling process that consistently and reliably delivers expected value.
Face it, problems do arise. What then? The Relationship Advantage reinforces the emotional connection between the customer and seller in a seamless transaction that works equally well during a challenging situation. When the product or service agreement fails, the customer must be able to trust that you’ll make it right.
You can’t beat word of mouth advertising. Referrals are priceless. But the majority of today’s referrals (and complaints) come via social media. You must make it easy for customers to recommend you to the world. Your unique sales process should consistently meet or exceed client expectations AND give them an easy-to-access referral process for introducing your company to others.
Today, happy clients will brag about you online and elsewhere if you treat them right (the reverse is also true). The Relationship Advantage rewards salespeople with unsolicited referrals, and the referral rate typically increases as the emotional relationship and trust level grow over time.
Do One Thing Well
In his classic, Good to Great, Jim Collins referenced the “Hedgehog Concept.” This principle reinforces the power of picking a single profitable strategy, becoming the best in the world at it, and then executing that approach over and over. Collin argues that when the going gets tough (like during a COVID crisis), groups that focus on what they’re best at survive and thrive.
The late Steve Jobs would have agreed. He once said, “Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”
That’s not to say a Transactional Strategy like Amazon cannot be concurrently executed alongside a high-touch emotional strategy like The Relationship Advantage. The danger is trying to accomplish both with the same approach, people, resources, and objectives.
It’s our job as leaders and managers to align our people and resources around a clear strategy and motivating vision so that we know what success looks like when we arrive, and have a shared stake in the outcome.
That way, regardless of which strategy or hybrid we embrace, we can all be equally enthusiastic about our unique contribution toward success.