Just about every company and every sales leader I meet and work with tells me, ‘We want our clients to think of us as more than just a vendor. We want to build strong partnerships with our clients.’ You know what? Your clients want that too! They wish somebody would come along who could help them identify the business problems that are keeping them from reaching their goals, help them determine which ones are the right problems to solve, and then roll up his sleeves and help them to achieve their desired business results.
Partnering with customers is not complicated, because . . .
The essence of partnership is working together toward a common goal or objective.
Building a vendor-client partnership is based on working together with our customer toward the common goal of better serving their customers. We do this by helping them to deliver higher-quality products and services, faster and more cost-effectively than their competition. Selling something is actually a small part of it. In fact, if that’s all we want to do, our customer will probably smell it a mile away. Buyers have a sense of discernment-to varying degrees, of course-but they can usually tell whether we are there to help them or to help ourselves.
Despite our good intentions, and our desire to follow the advice of author Stephen Covey, who said, ‘Seek first to understand, and then to be understood,’ many of us have been conditioned to start every introductory meeting with a quick overview of, ‘Who we are and what we do. The truth is, our prospective customers are far more interested in who they are and what they do. We’d probably be better off if we quit trying to impress them with facts about us and instead impress them with what we have taken the time to learn about them.
What if we stopped talking about what we do long enough to learn a little more about what they do and how they do it? What if we took the time to find out what their customers have been asking them for lately, or what they think their customers could really benefit from, but they haven’t yet figured out how to deliver? If we could brainstorm together about how we could help them to better serve their customers, or how we could help them better compete with their competitors, then partnering with us would be the only sensible thing to do.
To be perceived as more than just another vendor who will probably end up wasting their time, we will have to behave entirely differently than the other twenty-two vendors who will call them that day. We will have to come to the table with more than a glossy brochure and an ‘elevator pitch.’
If we want to build strong partnering relationships with our clients and earn access to decision makers and senior executives-such as those at the C-Level (CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, etc.)-we should start by investing the time to learn more about their world, their business, their goals and objectives, as well as the obstacles standing in their way of achieving them. Only then can we effectively articulate how our products and services can enable them to reach those goals and objectives, be more competitive in the marketplace, and produce more business value.
One of the most important truths of selling, which we must accept and should constantly remind ourselves of, is . . .
Nobody wants to buy what you sell. What they want are the business results they can achieve by utilizing what you sell to pursue their own goals and objectives.
Most of the things that you and I sell are not ends unto themselves. More often they are a means to an end. To develop a well-rounded understanding of your customer’s business and the ends they are trying to accomplish, you’ll probably have to talk to and interview several people who work there. Once we do earn access and get in front of a decision maker, we can’t afford to waste their time or ours. We should start by doing some research before we even ask for the appointment. In the next section, we will look at some of the things we can learn before our first meeting with our customer.