From the course: Account Management: Maintaining Relationships

Make it personal

- We've just been through the full sales process with the client. In doing so, you'll have built a bit of a personal relationship with them and for the most part you'll have remained professional. Even if it was looking like an easy winnable opportunity from the beginning, until they've agreed to work with you, you're still a salesperson and people have a natural aversion to trusting salespeople. I would argue wrongly, but it's understandable. We're financially incentivized to get our way so there can never be a hundred percent trust. However, now that has changed, the sale has taken place. You've had your commission and the product or service is being delivered. So, now their guard should come down. They've accepted you into their circle and made a commitment, plus you're no longer financially incentivized to affect their behavior. So, now is the best time to develop your personal relationship with them even more, beyond simply knowing what football team they support. We're trying to take this relationship from business associate on good terms to genuine friend, a trusted collaborator. So how do we do that? These relationships are best built in person, in a meeting, a lunch out for a drink and so on, and we'll come onto that in the next section. But in these meetings, we want to focus on any work appropriate, personal information that you could build a connection on hobbies, interests, if they have a family or not. Do they have kids? If so, how many and what ages. Do they play sports? And if so, what? What car do they drive? Do they have holidays upcoming? If so, where are they going? Anything that you think you can build a connection on. Consider your hobbies and interests and any connections there. There's no point in building connections on interests that you don't have. These connections must be genuine. These connections will be used for future reference in conversation, booking events they might be interested in and just retaining a strong reference point with them. If you don't have a meeting soon, or you aren't able to ask about personal interests, luckily, we live in the age of social media. An age where someone's entire persona and personal interests are rapidly accessible from your own pocket. So have a look around on their social media pages and see what they like. Maybe they're following certain groups or accounts that you also follow. Maybe there are pictures of them doing hobbies that you also enjoy, or maybe there'll be discussing musicians or artists that you also like. This information is things that they have shared and they have allowed people to see through their privacy settings, so use it, but whatever you do, store the information and keep a lists of who's into what. It takes the thinking out of the process. It means you never make the mistake of thinking they support a football team that they don't or getting their wife or husband's name wrong, or thinking that they like hockey when they actually like golf or thinking they grew up in London when they actually grew up in Caldwell.

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