Building and Maintaining Client Relationships

Happy Monday

We're all being impacted by AI, especially in sales. The challenge is how we leverage it effectively while still retaining our human side within the sales process.

I created this newsletter to share human-centric best practices, tips, resources, news, trends and all things that are relevant and timely to sales. If you missed the first issue on LinkedIn, you can CLICK HERE to read.?

This week, we're delving deeper into a crucial aspect of the sales process: building and maintaining client relationships.

Nurturing Customer Relationships

In the fast-paced world of sales, it's easy for us all to get caught up in the cycle of acquiring new leads and chasing prospects. I mean...we all have a quota to attain right? However, building long-lasting relationships with existing customers is just as important—if not more so—than securing new ones. In fact over 67% of business is from repeat customers or current clients and an increase of 5% in client retention can results in 75% higher in profitability. With these types of stats, why aren't we spending more time on building relationships than not?

Sales

The key to building successful relationship lies in providing value even as early as prospecting but also beyond the initial sale. This means staying engaged with your clients, understanding their evolving needs, and consistently delivering solutions that exceed their expectations. This can be accomplished by...

1. Uber personalization: Ensuring that you are tailoring your message, or any communication, for that matter, to the prospect or client shows that you value their time, understand them and their unique needs and that you care enough to spend the time to research or prepare to engage with them.
2. Value-added resources: Sharing relevant articles, industry insights, or exclusive offers keeps your brand top-of-mind and positions you as a trusted advisor in your customers' eyes. In fact, I live by the motto that you should give 3 things before you ask for 1 and in order for the resource to be counted as 1 of the 3, the prospect or client has to acknowledge the resource.
3. Consistent follow-up: Responding to your prospect or client in a timely manner when the follow-up has been agreed upon is a best practice. While expectations for follow-up can be set, sending communication that summarizes the conversation and follow-ups shortly after the engagement tells the prospect or client what to expect.
4. Proactive support: Anticipating and addressing potential issues before they arise demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction and builds trust over time.

Technology

While technology can streamline certain aspects of the relationship management, it's essential to use it in a way that augments or enhances—not replaces—the human touch that will set us apart from the competition.

1. CRM systems: Sales people really dislike inputing information into their CRM's for several reasons, of which we won't spend time here discussing as I am sure that we all know them. The reality is though, that a CRM can be our best friend by giving a place to input all information such as records of communication (ie email, text, DM, etc), next steps and just basic notes so that both the salesperson and leadership can be continuously updated. With these notes, we can ensure that we are always following up as we promised or as is expected but also that we uber personalize our follow-up.
2. Email automation tools: As part of prospecting, it now takes 15-20 touchpoints to engage with a prospect vs the 5-8 a few years back. While a client may not need that many, they still do not respond immediately back. Therefore, having a workflow in place that can continuously engage with the prospect or client is important, but rather than setting the workflow and just letting it go, we can engage throughout the process. Watching over the workflow will enable the sales person to engage when necessary, thereby still retaining the human element in the automated process.

There are other technology solutions that we can leverage, but the takeaway is that automation and AI tools can effectively help us in building and retaining relationships as long as we inject the human touch, the human connection within the process.

Humanity

As mentioned several times above, at the heart of every successful sales relationship is genuine human connection. Taking the time to listen, empathize, and understand your customers' needs fosters a sense of loyalty and mutual respect that transcends transactional exchanges.

We should never rely solely on the technology but should stay engaged, therefore building lasting relationships that close business with the prospective client and as a client.

Let's talk more about this on the Sellovatorz? Live on LinkedIn.

If you want to join me on stage to walk through some situations that you might have or even to simply role play, DM me prior to the 9am cst start time.

Stay Tuned...

HumAIn Sells is committed to helping you navigate the ever-changing landscape of sales by providing actionable insights and practical tips that you can implement right away. Together, we can elevate our sales performance and exceed expectations in 2024.

I'll see you back here next Monday evening, but in the meantime, you can find me hanging out at these events this week: March 31st Week Events .

LET'S WORK TOGETHER TO KILL YOUR SALES - BOOK WITH ME

About Denise Murtha Bachmann: With over 30 years in sales, latter half in AI/ML, sales over 75M, I help start-up sales teams and sales professionals kill their sales. Sellovatorz? helps sales to adopt and adapt to AI technologies while then shifting the focus on the higher value activities cultivating and elevating the human connection, creating the human experience that buyers of today demand.

Source: https://www.sellovatorz.com

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