Here is an off the wall comment that should take all of you salespeople by surprise. Instead of trying to focus at being the most successful salesperson in the company, you should try to focus on being the salesperson with the most value.

Success comes and success goes… it is a fact of life that the sales game is full of peaks and valleys and as a salesperson you learn to adjust. The way that I adjusted was to focus on making myself irreplaceable instead of the guy with a good price.

Once you give yourself a value to your customer it makes it harder for the customer to walk away from you… even if you make a mistake. The key to building this value is through building great relationships with your clients. That is the reason why we focus on the “relationship sales model” at Tiger Direct B2B… it works. A company/customer relationship is FUNDIMENTAL to the success of any company.

As an account manager you are as close to owning your own business as possible without actually owning your own business. Your success is highly dependent on getting your name into the field and building a loyal base of customers. An important part of your success is building the relationship with your customer in order to promote repeat business.

Here are some things that you can focus on in order to help build a better relationship with your customer:

Try telling a joke (keep it clean).

Try reading their horoscope (I used to use this one. It works to break the ice).

Ask about their weekend.

Talk about something funny that was on the news.

Send them a birthday card. (They will remember this one for a long time).

The important part is to focus the relationship around them. Get your customer to smile when they speak with you (you can hear a smile over the phone). Once that emotion of happiness is associated with you it will be much easier for your customer to buy from you.

A great example of this is the new Windows 7 advertisement from Microsoft. In this add it shows a little girl on her father’s computer talking about how there are so many “happy words” on his computer. Once you get to look at the computer screen you can see her point out all of the “Windows 7” phrases and she keeps calling them “happy”. You see Microsoft see’s the value of emotion based purchasing as they are trying to infuse happiness with Windows 7 (you will be happy if you use Windows 7).

Your true value is that your customer will be happy if they buy from you instead of buying from other salespeople at other companies. Quite often these relationships are genuine. That is the beauty of relationship sales. It often works out with better results than you expect and your income will be far more stable and rewarding than those agents who are a quick “flash in the pan”.

 Isn’t that a good thing?