Customers may love your products or service, your business, and even your customer service team. But do they love salespeople?

What can we do to earn respect and feel the love by customers and others who are not in sales (including my own university daughters)?

Here are our Top 5 Strategies to Get Customers to Love Salespeople:

1. Don’t be a professional visitor. Turn great relationships into business partnerships.

Many business owners cringe when they observe visiting salespeople chatting about last night’s sports game with their employees – they feel it’s wasting their people’s time. Yes, sales professionals love to build rapport in a meeting, but there are other ways to do this without upsetting the business owner.

Take this conversation to a higher level and take the time to develop and focus on their business. Start by asking questions like:

• What are your biggest initiatives to grow business this year?
• What is the top challenge that is getting in their way of your business?

Customers and buyers – especially business owners – LOVE talking about their business. Earn their appreciation and loyalty by turning your product conversation into a business conversation.

2. Be proactive, not reactive, by being one step ahead of your customers.

Good salespeople want to proactively better serve, provide value, and be one step ahead of their customer.

When you do this, it demonstrates you are proactively managing their account and the necessary activities to ensure you meet their timelines, their expected dates of delivery, or whatever else it takes to gain their business and long-term loyalty.

  3. Develop a Key Account Plan for your top 2-5 customers.

Personalize your approach with potential client growth.

According to CPSA, one of the key emerging trends is documenting a key account plan to high value customer accounts. A key account plan will help you better understand your customer’s business and future goals. Once the plan is created, meet with them to share and collaborate on the key account plan strategy and plan execution.

4. Bend over backwards. 

In one of our “Cracking the Code” Buyers Webinar one buyer panelist stated that to earn their business and loyalty, you have to bend over backwards. This could mean almost anything; your role is to find out how each customer defines “adding more value. Ask them exactly what you have to do to outperform your competition and be better than everyone else!

5. Send a hand-written Thank You note! 

In today’s fast-paced, digital-social-email-driven world, do something different to get noticed and even loved! Show your customer the love and you’ll feel the warmth and perhaps the love, too! Build this simple strategy into your sales process.

Customers often stop feeling the love after a sale has been made. That means they stop buying from you. Make sure your sales team continues to nurture customer relationships. Call me if you need help.

Lisa Leitch, CSP2

Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.