Make your sales meeting about the experience rather than about the relationship

Customers Experience Business Bitesize Challenging Customers Report

26 Jul Make your sales meeting about the experience rather than about the relationship

We all want to be liked by our customers, we want to have a good relationship with them, it makes
the interactions easier after all.

Building a relationship with your customers, being nice and likeable, thinking ‘the-customer-is-
always-right’, being generous with your time and working hard for them are all worthy skills…
BUT
Do they mean you win a sale or future sales?
How likely would existing customers be to re-purchase from you just because you get on well?

Here’s what a global head of sales in the hospitality industry had to say about this:
“…this is really hard to look at. Because for the last ten years it’s been our stated strategy to hire
effective relationship builders…”

What’s reassuring is that even big businesses make this mistake, they also prefer to focus on building
submissive, non-assertive relationships with their customers rather than challenging them.

However, Neil Rackman, founder of a world-renowned sales training company says:
“It (a customer relationship) is a reward that the salesperson earns by creating customers value.
If you help customers think differently and bring them new ideas – which is what the Challenger
sales rep does – then you earn the right to a relationship”

So successful selling and a profitable relationship with your customer comes from challenging them
and not from just having a cosy relationship with them.
A subtle but vital distinction.

To be successful in sales you need to recruit Challenger salespeople, not Relationship Builders,
and then train all your existing salespeople in the skills of being a Challenger – click here, download the report and find out how…



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