People will buy how you sell long before they buy what you sell. How you treat people speaks volumes. People will remember if you treat them better than your competition treats them.
In one case, practicing this technique led to a customer of mine raising their annual purchase order from half a million annually to nearly four million dollars a year.
In a previous life I sold power tools for a large company in that field. Nearly everything we sold went through industrial distributors. Those distributors didn't just sell our brand, but a lot of our competitors' brands as well.
I would watch as my competition ignored everyone but the owner and the purchasing agent at those distributors. They wanted nothing to do with anyone else, and would walk right past all the salespeople and everyone else in the office, beating down a path to the door of the owner and purchasing agent.
See, they assumed that if a purchasing agent bought their tool, they were good to go. They didn't even think about the fact that the tools still had to sell to the end customer, much less who it was that made that happen.
I, on the other hand, made friends with everyone who worked for the distributors. I would talk to the salespeople about what we were doing. I gave shirts and hats to the guys that unloaded the trucks in the back.
For some reason, I always outsold my competitors.
I had one account in particular where this was obvious. The client was buying less than a half million worth of tools from us each year. I made a conscious decision to treat everyone there differently than my competition was. In just a couple years, the client upped their annual order to nearly four million dollars. Not only that, but three of my competitors had their brands kicked out.
That was all because I developed relationships at the multiple levels, not just with the people high up in the company.
Of course, that sounds easier than it was. It required a lot of work. It required doing things differently than my competition. And it required treating people differently than I was completely comfortable with.
Remember, it's not about what you sell, it's about how you sell.
