Sales and Service: Building Customer Relationships

An interactive two-day workshop for sales and service professionals

At a time when competition for customers is intensifying and profit margins are shrinking, Building Customer Relationships has never been more critical. Most workshops about selling and building customer relationships focus on the behavior of the salesperson rather than on the behavior of the customer. Traditional sales techniques may work well when everyone thinks and behaves the same. But they don't! Businesses don't do business with businesses. People do business with people. And people are often unpredictable, confusing, inconsistent, and downright frustrating to deal with.

The answer has to do with each customer's personality. Clashes in personality can damage relationships, destroy sales, weaken productivity and prevent good business opportunities from moving forward. Too often, people assume that we are all pretty much alike and motivated by similar things. This misunderstanding can create tension and result in lost business opportunities. The bottom line is that people are different and unique. They like to be treated differently and uniquely. But how can you know how others want to be treated?

Each of us telegraphs our personal style by how we are energized, how we interact with others, how we gather information, how we make decisions, how we resolve conflict and how we structure our lifestyles. Learning how to read signals in others can help you to determine an individual's personality type.

Participants learn to apply their knowledge of personality preferences to the issues that affect customer relationships the most:

• Communicating

• Presenting ideas

• Seeking information

• Decision-making

• Handing priorities and deadlines

• Dealing with change

• Working through conflict

Successful salespeople know that there are no easy formulas. Their success is found in their willingness to individualize their approach to customer interactions. They understand that success in sales relies on building unique relationships with customers on an individual basis. They realize that if you are interacting with someone from a foreign country, you must learn to speak their language and understand cultural differences. Similarly, adapting one's style to different personality types means learning to speak the customer's "language".

Tero's Building Customer Relationships workshop provides insights into personality type and human behavior. It helps salespeople in the organization incorporate these insights into their own unique approaches to customer interactions and produce meaningful, lasting performance for the company. It provides salespeople with useful tools to communicate more effectively, resolve conflicts, present information and sell to customers in ways that make customers eager to do business with you.

It is not only important to do these four steps. The steps must be done in the right order. When traditional sales training and Tero's approach are studied side-by-side, we quickly discover that most sales training programs equip sales professionals with important skills that are appropriate to use in Step Three of the sales process. When they are used too early, sales are reduced to discussions around price and volume, relationships suffer and neither party receives the full benefit and outcome that the steps to an outcome-driven sale deliver.