Our Salespeople Can't Damage Relationships that Don't Exist

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, sharing Sharing with you ideas and insights on the topic, your salespeople can't damage relationships that don't exist. The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. Are you tired of coaches and consultants telling you just the what you need to do to scale your business, but don't necessarily help you out with the how? Sandler has lots of what's and will help you out with the how. So it doesn't, like you said, to a sales training class, and you've got a shiny toy to try out on your clients and prospects. Go to www.hamish.sandler.com slash howtosandler for more details. Before we get to today's episode, want to give a shout out to user RWYYC, who left us a review titled Easy to Follow. Episode one started off with a very clear outline of how leaders can set up their sales teams for success.

[1:24] Hamish includes real life examples and makes it easy to understand the critical steps to being a successful sales leader. After listening to this episode, I went back and did an internal audit and there were some areas that required some attention. Looking forward to future episodes. Thank you, listener RWYYC. Look forward to reading your review at a future episode. So please leave us a rating and review on Google or iTunes. Also want to give a shout out to listeners in Canada who bumped us back into the top 100 in the careers section. Thanks for getting us back into the top 100. Appreciate your support. Love to give a shout out. Continue to give shout outs to listeners around the world as we continue to rise up the rankings for podcasts in careers and in business.

[2:13] A common talk track that salespeople have with their leaders is I have a great relationship with a prospect or with a client. And oftentimes, that relationship only exists in the salesperson's head. Let's take, for example, the prospect, quote-unquote, relationship. Most salespeople equate having a great relationship with a prospect to the fact that the prospect is responding to their requests for meetings, calls, demos, et cetera, et cetera, while, This is normal for a prospect because the prospect is in an information gathering phase. And if the salesperson is willing to offer them what amounts to free consulting in order to do that, well, I'll take free consulting all day long. I'm sure you'll take free consulting all day long. I'll happily have an expert tell me how to solve my problems when I don't have to pay for it. And that's really what our salespeople are doing with their prospects early on. Yes, there's got to be some level of rapport. And the root of the word rapport is the word trust, which we talked about in a previous episode. So there's got to be some level of trust between our prospects and our salespeople. But that's not a relationship.

[3:35] And I'll talk about later what a good acid test for do we have a relationship is. But with prospects, we generally have a sense of trust and a sense of comfort, but we don't have a real relationship. A real relationship begins when the prospect says, I'm going to work with you and awards our salesperson their business. Now, when we hear from our salespeople in terms of prospect interactions, I don't want to damage the relationship. What the salesperson is really telling us is they are afraid to get to the truth because Because they've got a sense somewhere deep down in their tummy that the prospect that they're talking to is probably not going to award their business to them. And so when we're coaching them to ask a question that the salesperson might perceive as challenging, or we're asking them to dig beneath the surface of their prospects' responses to gather the information that we need to really qualify them and determine that they're a good prospect, and our salesperson says, oh, well.

[4:44] You know, I could ask that, but I don't want to damage the relationship, what they're saying is, I'm afraid. And that's fine. We're allowed to be afraid. We're all human beings. We all have fears. We're all allowed to not want to ask that question. But remind our salesperson to keep the mindset that the purpose of every interaction

[5:06] with a prospect, with a client, really with any human being, is to get to the truth. And even if that truth is, it's not a good fit, our salespeople will have more difficulty in asking these questions if their funnel looks more like a pencil. So when our salespeople start to have the funnel get a little bit skinny, that's when we're going to hear a lot more about all these great relationships that they have and that they don't want to damage them, specifically with prospects. Okay.

[5:41] Again, there is no relationship with a prospect. There is a level of mutual trust. There's a level of mutual respect, but there is not a true relationship. So respectfully challenging our salespeople to get to the truth, asking those tough questions of our prospects to really qualify them out and to keep their funnel consistently reliably full is going to reduce the number

[6:06] of times we hear, I don't want to damage a relationship with a prospect. Now, of course, let's flip it over to the client side. So when we do earn a prospect's business and they become our client, this is where the relationship starts.

[6:19] Because what our now client has essentially said to our salesperson is, I trust you enough to solve this problem or these problems. So now they're giving them their trust and we've got to keep that trust. Trust takes years to build and seconds to destroy.

[6:38] But we want to start building that relationship and increasing the rapport we have with our clients. Now, we do that, first of all, by doing what we say by when we say we're going to do it. And also, if our salesperson is unable to fulfill a commitment to a prospect or to a client, whether that is giving them a piece of information or having a solution in place by a certain deadline, the more proactive they can be and the earlier they can be in letting a client know that, the less impact and the less damage that information will have on the rapport

[7:17] and the relationship with that client. The acid test I mentioned earlier for a relationship is, does the client ask your salespeople for support in solving problems that don't directly put money in that salesperson's pocket. So if we are selling IT services and our client is asking their account rep for support with insurance, do they know someone who sells insurance and could they make an introduction?

[7:50] That is when we have a really true relationship because our client is trusting our salesperson to talk about and get support on topics that don't directly relate to the products or services that our salesperson sells. So that's the acid test. Ask your sales people, how many conversations have you had with your current clients about topics that don't relate to personal, you know, family, et cetera, et cetera, sports, holidays, but that are related to supporting them in their business that we don't directly sell. And if they don't.

[8:31] Haven't had those conversations, that's okay, because they're probably not thinking about it, right? They're incentivized to sell their stuff, that makes sense. But to really have a true relationship with a client, that is when the client is asking us for support in their business with topics that don't directly put money in our pocket. The challenge here is, once we ask this question, our salespeople are likely to go out and start running around trying to have these conversations with their clients. And it's going to come off as inauthentic, inorganic, and we may actually unintentionally damage the rapport with our current client base through our salespeople because now we've got it in our salespeople's heads that they have to ask about all these other things.

[9:15] Best practice, bring these things up at the quarterly review. So all of us are doing consistent, regular quarterly reviews with at least our top 20 clients for each of our salespeople.

[9:28] Bring in that question to the prospect or to the client of what's going on in your world outside of our narrow band. And we had a client once who said, well, I can't give an introduction to any of my clients. And I said, well, what do you mean by that? And they said, well, I don't know anybody who's going to be a prospect for my client. And I said, hey, that's fine. Who's the title on the business card of the person that you typically talk to? And they say, well, I'm usually working directly with the CEO or the president. I said, great. My knowledge of presidents is they're looking for lots of other things in their business like IT, insurance, legal, accounting. Do you know somebody who might be able to support them with that? And big grin on our client's face. And they said, absolutely. Now that I know I'm not talking directly about finding them prospects, I can support them in many, many different ways because I've got lots of great connections. So when our account reps say, I don't want to damage a relationship with a client.

[10:36] We need to really interrogate what that means. And interrogate is a really aggressive word, but digging below the surface. What do they mean by damaging the relationship? And by the way, do they even have a relationship? If we called up that account and said, hey, I'm calling from from ABC Co. And wondering how it's going with your account rep, in my experience, more often than not, the response is, oh yeah, we just buy from them. I don't really know who, we just call it and talk to whoever we talk to over there. Doesn't sound like a really awesome relationship for our account rep. So the idea of a relationship is wonderful and it's critical for success, success. But the buzzword of a relationship, and you can't see me do the air quotes as I put them around the word relationship, is that.

[11:22] A true relationship transcends the sales interaction that we have, whether we are selling an enterprise and we may only sell one package to one client every three years and with a little bit of upsell here and there, or if we're in highly transactional and our clients are calling us on a daily or a weekly basis to buy more stuff from us, a true relationship transcends all of that. And it doesn't mean that we're going fishing or we're going to have drinks or we even get invited to our clients' weddings. Those are all really great indicators that we have great levels of trust with our clients. But a true relationship is deeper than just having trust. It's where both parties are willing to talk to the other about topics that don't

[12:14] directly relate to their transactional relationship. This has been the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I've been your host, Hamish Knox. Today, sharing with you some ideas and insights around the idea of relationships with both prospects and clients and how our salespeople will usually use the phrase, I don't want to damage a relationship as a way to not tell us that they're actually afraid of getting to the truth with a prospect or with a client.

[12:44] Thanks for listening. Give us a rating or review wherever you find us. We're on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google Play. The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. If you're tired of consultants and coaches only giving you the what you need to do to scale your business, but don't give you support with how to do it, go to hamish.sandler.com slash howtosandler to find out more about how we support our clients, not only with the what's, but also with the how's. If you would like to get transcripts of these episodes, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com. We've got most of the episodes up right now and we'll be adding new episodes as they come out. Again, fullfunnelfreedom.com. Until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom. Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[13:47] Music.