Relationship Selling - What Is It?

In this series of articles, I'm going to discuss something that a lot of people don't understand. It's called relationship selling. Quite honestly, the reasons they don't get it are many. A lot of it has to do with conditioning and a lot of it has to do with misconceptions. Actually, there is a very fine line between those two things because many misconceptions actually come from conditioning. Hopefully, after reading this series, you'll have a solid understanding of just what relationship selling is.

When I first started marketing online, there was a phrase that really bothered me. Actually, it was more like a saying. It went like this. "It's just a numbers game." I asked what that meant and the general answer I got was that for every so many people you approach about an opportunity, only so many of them will say yes. I couldn't understand this. Why would that be? If something was really good, wouldn't a large number of people want to have it? And as I started seeing the way people went about their business, I finally started to get it. Marketers were looking at prospects as just that, prospects. They didn't see them as people with feelings. They were not trying to build a relationship with their prospects first.

I then started asking myself questions. Do I want to be thought of as just a number? Don't I care what people think of me as a person? Don't I want them to see that I have feelings and needs? I mean for crying out loud, what has this world come to? Have we really been reduced to walking into a fast food joint, asking for the value meal of the day and being told to move down the line like we were cattle? Boy, wouldn't it be nice if people would take the time out to say, "Have a nice day" and really mean it.

So when I started to actually market online, I said to myself that I wouldn't just be a cog in an assembly line. I was going to try the personal approach. Now mind you, I really didn't know what relationship selling was at the time. I just knew that I didn't want to treat my prospects like just a number. As a started to study the art of relationship selling, I realized that it was more than just saying "Have a nice day." Relationship selling is a very complex process involving a number of techniques.

You will have to master many things in order to master the art of relationship selling. Some of these things you will learn quickly and some of them will take quite some time and practice. You would like to think that being able to relate to somebody would come naturally. Unfortunately, because of our conditioning and misconceptions, along with the fast pace of the world we live in, we have a hard time relating to this concept. Hopefully, by the time this whole series is over, relationship selling will be second nature to you.

 

 

Source: © www.TheWritersManifesto.com