Many years ago, I worked in the foodservice division of a major CPG company. I remember taking my boss on a call to a distributor customer where I had a solid, long-term relationship. We had the classic WIN/WIN and the customer and I parted feeling good!
When we were doing our post-call review, the boss asked why I didn’t follow the company approved “persuasive selling format’. She was right, I didn’t follow the persuasive selling format because it didn’t work for the customer. We had a conversational flow, with high trust and straight talk, that was successful.
Selling is an art and takes hard work and practice. Your selling style should flex with the customer’s style and shouldn’t be static. In the end, it means you really need to work on your “relationship intelligence”.
I recommend reading RELATIONAL GENIUS written by my business coach Dr. Tricia Groff to up your skills.
