NOTE: This is a guest-post from @Stephen, editor and publisher of Business Development in Context, a web-magazine dedicated to improving your business through personal development and social media networking. You can follow him on Twitter here @the_future.
Turning prospects and contacts into customers and partners
The internet has created a whole new world for meeting new people and creating relationships that can be mutually profitable. Blogs, Twitter, Digg, Forums, Facebook, LinkedIn – so many ways to expand your presence as an individual or as a business. No matter what service or application that we use, there are a handful of steps that we need to follow in order to expand a comment or reply into a relationship:
- Figure out who this person is, what they want, and determine your compatibility. This means follow-up, folks. And not an automated response like “Thanks for your Comment”, but something personal and real. Plus, you get a chance to ask them, “What can I do for you?”
- Begin a regular dialogue, using information that our new contact can use. Keep it useful, concise, and stay away from stuff that looks like a commercial for your own business.
- Ask open-ended questions to learn more about this new contact. Ask them about what they have been up to, you may be surprised to learn that you have more (or less) in common than you thought.
- Be aware that people reveal themselves over time. Don’t try to rush things – just pay attention to the signs and go with your gut.
- Maintain your integrity – do what you say you’re going to do. This can be the hardest part of the process, but if you can maintain your discipline it will become second nature.
The real secret to developing relationships with new people is finding out if you like them, and then earning their friendship. If your new contacts feel as though they can get value from you as a person they will perceive that your business and your network have value also.
Give value first, and the relationship will follow.
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Thank you for the guest post, @Stephen – and for being a sponsor of Word Sell!
Brad Shorr
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Brad,
Good to visit briefly last week at the conclusion of your visit with Lou. It has been a while!
I spoke with Lou about your business model and decided to visit the Word Sell, Inc. site to sample something of your current business endeavor. Interesting stuff and concept. Spend a good deal of my time these days writing copy for office supply catalogs and cleaning up on-line content for our products sold to the commercial office supply marketplace.
Concerning the “Turning prospects…” post, the author makes some good points. Most of his observations I buy into but do take exception with a couple –
* His last bullet point about the difficulty in maintaining your integrity throws me a bit. You either have it or you don’t; tough thing to fake but easy to maintian if it is there. Perhaps he means something more akin to biting your tongue – but that is a far cry from what he said!
* I don’t feel the secret in developing relationships with others is driven by finding out if you like them. Pretty narrow approach, in my mind. Most of us are better served by being open-minded in our initial contact and seeking middle/common ground. If an exploration of interests and values reaps results that can be repeated and built upon, then you have the basis for an interpersonal relationship that may deveop into a friendship. Acquaintances are everywhere; true friends are found in the nooks and crannies of life and to be valued highly, if not above all else.
Take care,
Bill
Hi @Stephen – thank you for the guest post today. You gave us some very clear and helpful ideas on aspects of sales skills that are hard to articulate.
Hi Bill, Thanks for stopping by. It was good to see you as well! Regarding today’s post, I think @Stephen, you, and I are all on the same page there – integrity is something you can’t compromise. But business pressure (which is mounting every day) can be a real temptation. People can reach a point where they have a tough choice between maintaining integrity and doing what’s expedient. The other issue is a tough one. I think most sales people tend to gravitate toward customers they like or think they’ll get to like, but you never know. You have to make the best of every situation, especially in the kind of industrial sales we’re used to, where buying contacts within accounts change on a regular basis.
Hi Bill, good points. I would submit that it is harder to maintain one’s integrity than most people think. The internet makes it pretty easy to “cheat” or do things anonymously that one might not do if their name was on it.
As for “liking” someone before you develop a friendship, I believe that it is very important. I believe that working toward building a relationship with someone you do not like leads to phony behavior (there’s that integrity again) and could, theoretically, damage relationships that you have with others.
I do not mean to say that one cannot have a certain level of relationship (strictly a business dealing, perhaps) with someone that you do not like, but it is likely not going to develop into a valued friendship.
Hi Stephen – this is great advice. A lot of people make the mistake of using social networking as a traffic building tool and don’t seem to realise the importance of building relationships.
I totally agree on the linking people bit too. I know folk who have business relationships with people they don’t like & it seems cheap and false.