Transaction or Lifelong Relationship?

Lifelong Relationships

Here’s a great observational comment that Norma Rist made to someone she was coaching:

“You are treating your customers as transactions but you need to think of them as lifelong relationships.”

Have you ever been in sales? Or operations? It is the 16th and you are fast approaching the end of the month.  Will you make your quota? Will the proposals that are outstanding come in before the 31st?

Do your potential customers become dollar signs or lines on your P&L as you think through your finances? Sometimes it is hard to avoid that trap, isn’t it?  You have financial obligations and if you could get just one more customer before the end of the month you’d hit your break even. It is when we think like that, that our conversation changes with prospects.

We move from recommendations to sales pitches.  How do we avoid treating our customers or potential customers as transactions and think about the opportunity for a lifelong relationship?

What would that mean in terms of our conversations. Might that mean that we walk away from a “sure thing” sale today and settle for planting seeds for the future? Customers are smart. They know when we are SELLING versus making recommendations based on need.

Frances Sharpe has written an article offering tips for Retaining Customers. In the article she talks about the value of the customer relationship and actually suggests a mathematical formula for calculating the financial value of a lifelong customer relationship.  Good stuff! 

If you were to ask your customers; would they say they felt like a transaction or a lifelong friend?