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I was listening to Andy Paul's excellent podcast, “the win rate”, link here
There is an all-star sales pro panel with David Ruggiero, Founder of DR Sales, Semir Jahic, CEO of SalesMotion, and David Connors, CEO of The Swarm
They talk about the importance of relationships to win deals
But then the conversation got more honest and they talk about about losing deals
In fact, they say that losing deals was often because the competition had better relationships
David Connors says "when there are 100's of options to buy, what do you do, you go and ask your friends, the people you trust."
The panel pointed out that “these conversations are happening whether you know about it or not”
They then drill down on this point, on why deals are lost
"my team went and did everything right, the customer said we pitched it right, we had the right contacts, we had the right buyers identified and it turned out that they bought something they were familiar with”
They lost the deal because somebody at the buyer had a better relationship with a competitor
Let me repeat that …..
"they lost a deal because of relationships”
I loved the next comment of the panel that "Salespeople are often surprised by this"
The panel offer great advice that salespeople should be proactive at building relationships and looking for competitor relationships and the importance of a relationship matrix, during the sale
The final thing that we loved was the comment
“We all see the statistics about how influential social selling is”
There advice is to “not only to think about social selling, but to think about the buyer community that are up and coming. These are the people that grew up on social networks are now making the buying decisions and they are very comfortable doing that through crowdsourcing with their networks.”
Andy sums up by saying “relationships will gain importance, over time, as AI becomes more part of it because. AI will create a leveling of vendors and how are you going to stand out? And it's about connecting at a human level”.
If you want to read about social selling statistics read on
(Thanks to Rob Durant for the inspiration behind this)
Related: A Quarter of 18-34 Year-Olds Never Answer the Phone