Situation No. 1: Customers get the feeling they’re being taken for granted and are no longer receiving the special treatment they had when the account was first opened.

They were pleased with the way they were treated as prospects. But they noticed a difference once they became customers. This approach makes it difficult to maintain a positive relationship that leads to continuing business.

Solution: Building and maintaining trust is essential for making a customer feel special in establishing a long-term relationship.

Situation No. 2: Customers feel salespeople are more interested in finding new, larger accounts than continuing to spend time with them.

Changing the frequency of calls and visits may convince them that a salesperson is looking for bigger and better customers.

Solution: To build loyal customers salespeople need to live inside their customers’ heads, to think customers’ thoughts and to walk their customers’ paths.

Situation No. 3: They get the idea that the only time a salesperson wants to see them is when he/she has something to sell.

Customers are looking for salespeople who constantly show concern — and not simply at the point of sale.

Solution: Consistent cultivation of present customers is one of the best ways to head off customer defections. The objective is to be viewed by customer as a consultant and an expert in their business.

Customers always prefer to work with those who understand their business
and are focused on solving their critical business problems. They’re not likely to switch the business from a salesperson who is providing this kind of expertise.

Top salespeople use these four tactics to tap into a prospect’s pain and gain the emotional edge that leads to more deals:

1. Determine your strength. There are three areas where salespeople can differentiate themselves from the competition:

• Product. Do you have a product or service that is clearly a better fit for the prospect?
• Reputation. Has your company built an iron-clad reputation for superior quality and better service than anyone else in the market?
• Relationship. What do you personally bring to the table in terms of solutions, product knowledge and expertise that others don’t? Once you know which area gives you the edge, use that as the jumping-off point for your value proposition.

2. Uncover each prospect’s motivation. Most buying decisions are based on a combination of logical reasoning and buyer emotion. Prospects are generally motivated by four emotional triggers:

1. Pain avoidance. A product or service alleviates one of a prospect’s biggest headaches.
2. Self-preservation. Moving forward with the buying decision will improve a prospect’s standing in the company or cause others to credit them with finding the ideal solution to a problem.
3. Self-gratification. Doing business together will make the prospect’s job easier (or less stressful).
4. Fear. Continuing to do business with a competitor will hurt the prospect’s business and could eventually put their job at risk. Tying each key benefit to an emotional trigger helps personalize an offer, and it creates a sense of urgency for the prospect to make a buying decision.

3. Find an internal champion. If there are other people or departments in the prospect’s organization that can benefit from your products or services, ask to speak with them in order to gain a better feel for what their needs are. It’s a great way to gain a stronger foothold in the organization.

Eventually, you can focus on one or more of these people as your “internal champion(s),” helping you navigate the buying process from within. Internal champions all have one thing in common: They have a selfish reason for wanting you to win. Maintaining regular contact with an internal champion can help you gain inside information, know what moves to make (and when to make them), as well as learn more about what competitors are offering and how you can counter.

4. Go after the decision makers. Even in a situation where a prospect has buying power, there are almost always others in the company who will impact the final decision. Learn who the key players are in every prospect’s organization, what role they play in the buying process (approving purchases, suggesting alternatives, etc.), and what they value most.

Appealing to their emotion may create even more momentum. Once they tell the prospect to move forward with a sale, the deal is as good as done.

Adapted from the book Heavy Hitter Sales Wisdom by Steve Martin.

1. Integrity. Ninety-six percent of customers say that the No. 1 thing they look for in salespeople is integrity. People want to do business with those whom they trust.
2. Empathy. This is a salesperson’s ability to view life from the customer’s point of view. There isn’t a problem that aggressiveness could get you into that an equally strong measure of empathy won’t keep get you out of.
3. Initiative. This is the tendency to be proactive. It’s requires doing something without having someone tell you to do it.
4. Knowledge. Most customers report that what they want in a supplier is to deal with salespeople who are knowledgeable. If knowledge is power, then what you don’t know holds great power over you.
5. Courage. This is not the absence of fear — it’s the management of fear. Value-added salespeople feel the fear and do what they know they must do to overcome it.

Value and price

Value-added salespeople are skilled at directing the conversation towards value, not price. They uncover the customer’s need, analyze the costs associated with that need, and translate features of their product into what it will do for the customer.

Two dimensions of value

There are two dimensions of what customers value:

• Need for relationship. Customers with a high need for relationship place a high value on the salesperson’s ability to understand them, their needs, strategy and challenges, and their future plans. Buyers who are less experienced with the product they are buying will place a high value on this type of relationship.
• Need for information. Salespeople who are able to provide easy access to information save their customers time and effort, and make it easier to do business with them.

Customer interaction preferences

The first step in value-added selling is to find out what your customers value. Each customer has his or her own perspective on value, usually falling into one of the following categories:

• The transactional buy. Customers here have low needs for a relationship and low needs for information. They just want the right product at the right time at the lowest price.
• The relationship buy. These customers have a high need for a relationship. They need salespeople who have an in-depth understanding of their situation.
• The information buy. Customers have a high need for information and a low need for a relationship. They know what they want, and want to be informed and educated.
• The partnership buy. These customers have a high relationship need and a high information need. They want a salesperson who understands their company and their needs.

While the law says you have to give customers a way to opt out of mailings, it’s also important to keep the door open just a bit.

Remember, just because a customer wants off your e-mail list doesn’t mean your relationship is irreparably broken.

Some subscribers might be changing their preferences for communications from companies like yours. Some customers might be shifting most of their load to social media networks.

The easier (and more civil) you keep the unsubscribe process, the more likely it is you could be invited to join another mode of message sharing.

If your unsubscribe process is difficult, you can bet people will remember you — but for all of the wrong reasons. And former customers are sure to spread the word to their friends and peers if your unsubscribe process is clunky.

A few pointers on achieving an amicable parting:

• Make the exit clear. Don’t bury links in other texts or make readers jump through other pages to get opt-out access. Once a subscriber zeroes in on the opt-out tab, make it quick and easy. One click should do it, with an immediate confirmation.
• Ask why. Offer subscribers the opportunity to explain why they’re leaving. This shouldn’t be a required step in order to achieve opt-out, though.
• Offer different options. Would the person like to receive e-mail on a different day? Perhaps the person just isn’t a fan of e-mail anymore. Try to find out what the customer is looking for now, and what the best format is for presenting it. If possible, ask if the person would like to friend you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter instead.

Trust is an extremely rare commodity, built up slowly and painstakingly. It’s fragile, capable of being shaken or even destroyed by a single action or mistake. Building and maintaining trust is essential for establishing a long-term relationship.

Trust must be earned – and re-earned

Some people may be able to manipulate a customer into buying once, but they won’t establish a partnership until there is trust. If customers trust you, they’ll tell you their needs and expectations — and give you their business for years.

One slip up — a broken promise, a false claim, a breach of trust — and you risk losing a customer forever.

Here are four keys to earning customers’ trust:

1. Clarity. Prospects count on salespeople to explain benefits in terms they can understand.
2. Mutual commitment. Prospects enter into contracts with the salespeople they feel most secure with. The more both parties trust each other, the stronger the business relationship will be.
3. Shared development. Salespeople earn trust by always looking for new ways to improve the prospect’s business.
4. Focus. Prospects look for salespeople who can choose two or three customer-centric benefits and focus everything else around them.

Source: Wesley Forcier, President of Alpha Marketing, Brookline, MA.

Customers don’t usually leave because of a lower price or a service problem. Most are smart enough to know the problems associated with price cutters and are understand when mistakes are made (as long as they’re not reoccurring).

Here are three more likely reasons customers will jump ship to find new suppliers. Pass them along at your next sales meeting.

1. Customers get the feeling they’re being taken for granted and are no longer receiving the special treatment they got when their accounts were first opened. They were pleased with the way they were treated as prospects. But they notice the difference once they became customers. This approach makes it difficult to maintain a positive relationship that leads to continuing business.
2. Customers feel you’re more interested in finding new, larger accounts than continuing to spend time with them. Changing the frequency of your calls and visits may convince them that you’re looking for bigger and better customers.
3. They get the idea that the only time their suppliers want to see them is when they’re being sold something new. Customers are looking for salespeople who constantly show concern — not just at the point of sale.

1. The ability to overcome ‘sales inertia’

For some salespeople, the biggest obstacle to closing is the fact that a prospect is reluctant to stop doing business with an incumbent supplier.

Instead of accepting the fact that prospects with incumbent suppliers aren’t worth the effort, top closers conduct precall research to uncover areas where the existing supplier is coming up short.

Top closers may also focus on benefits they offer that the existing supplier can’t, using them as a way of making the prospect consider a change.

2. Specialization

In today’s competitive marketplace, there’s often very little that separates one company’s products and services from a competitor’s.

Top closers differentiate their offer by focusing on each sale from the prospect’s perspective. What motivates each prospect to buy? How does the prospect’s buying process work? What are his or her biggest needs and how can your company provide the ideal solution? These are the questions prospects want answers to.

Top closers may even contact others at the prospect’s company to learn more about the company’s goals, its mission and what the prospect values most.

3. The patience to gain one commitment at a time

Great salespeople don’t go into every sales situation expecting to close a prospect, at least not at first. Instead, they work to earn the prospect’s trust one commitment at a time.

The goal of the first meeting may be nothing more than to schedule a second meeting. After that, the goal of each sales call is to move the sale forward with small commitments — a demo, a free trial, an agreement to draw up a contract, etc.

When broken down into these small steps, the buying decision isn’t nearly as daunting, and the salesperson builds a worthwhile relationship at the same time.

4. The skill to develop partnerships

The number one complaint today’s buyers have about salespeople is that they don’t abide by the prospect’s buying process.

Top closers work with prospects early on to understand how their buying process works. Then they create a timeline based on when the prospect is looking to make a buying decision.

The more a salesperson is viewed as an advocate (and an ally), the better the chance he/she will ultimately win more business.

Based in part on the book Sales Presentation Techniques: That Really Work by Stephan Schiffman

The problem? So many e-mails are sent today that customers can be crushed under the sheer volume.

The solution: Make contact with customers on their terms.

Two tactics that get your messages read:

• Gather preferences at sign up. Before someone signs up to receive your e-mail, collect information about them — but make sure you don’t clobber them with lengthy subscriber forms. Simply ask what kind of relationship they want to have with you. Do they want to be contacted with only specific offers or promotions? Seasonally? Encourage the customer set the ground rules.
• Resist the urge to tell everyone one what’s new with your company. If customers have told you what they expect (see above), don’t bombarded everyone with e-mail trumpeting your latest success. Instead, put it on your website, and only e-mail news items to customers who’ve expressed interest in product, service or general company updates.

Is there any hope that a sales expert or marketing pro could step in, even at this late hour, and help restore this customer’s loyalty?

After all, it’s more than just an account that walked out your door. It was a consistent source of income.

What’s worse, that one customer could be costing your business more money, by sharing his bad experience with other potential or current customers.

It’s not too late

Good news:  It isn’t too late to go into damage control mode and reel him back in.

Here are four steps you can take at this point to rescue the relationship:

• Find out what the original problem was. Why did it upset the customer? What did the customer expect to happen? At this point, let the customer talk until he runs out of gas.
• Thank the customer for explaining the problem, and apologize sincerely for the inconvenience it caused. This doesn’t mean you have to agree, disagree or dispute what he said.
• Find out what, if anything, you or your company could do to get the relationship back on track. Perhaps the customer wants something very specific, which may not be very difficult to honor. It could even be something as simple as extending a discount.
• Work with the customer to come up with a plan to ensure this problem doesn’t repeat itself. Maybe there’s something your company could do that’ll benefit more than one customer. If so, the original customer probably would be pleased to know of the broader, positive impact.

Even if you don’t woo the customer back, he’ll know you’re sincere — which hopefully prevents him from badmouthing you in the future.

Who knows? That customer could even have a falling out with his new vendor and be back before you know it.

What are some of the things you’ve done to retain a once disgruntled customer? Let us know in the Comments Box below.