Sales Are Dead, So It's Time To Build Relationships - Michael Walsh
Michael Walsh is an entrepreneur with a talent for making big business ideas very simple and easily understood. He is the founder and president of Kaizen Consulting and he tells us that ‘sales’ is dead.
Michael believes that a strong business relies on the relationship between your company and your customer and at the heart of that relationship is the Value Exchange. Michael defines the Value Exchange as the relationship between your profit and the value your customer gets from you.
Relationships and Value
“You always need a relationship sufficient to do business” says Michael “The larger the level of business, the stronger the relationship needs to be.” To build a strong business, says Michael, you need two key elements: A valued word and a transparent Value Exchange. The first is simple, keep your word. If your customer/client can’t trust you to keep your word then they’re not going to want to do business with you. The second element is a bit more complicated but is equally important. You need to have a good value exchange and to make sure that the synergy of the value exchange is as transparent as possible.
When your customer/client knows exactly why and how doing business with you benefits them and you, they will be able to see the sustainability of the deal and feel far better about doing business with you. It builds a level of trust and the more trust your customer/client has in you, you more likely they are to stick with you. Of course, in order for this to work, you need to make sure there is a benefit to doing business with you. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and take their perspective: look at your company through the eyes of a potential customer, what do they really gain from doing business with you? How obvious is that gain? You have to return focus to those questions because the moment you stop focusing on the value your customer gets from you, you risk your profit.
"The moment you stop focusing on the value your customer gets from you, you risk your profit" Making an effort to see things from your customer’s perspective is vital to a successful business. As Michael points out, it’s a sustainable and scalable method and it’s the start to growing a relationship between your business and your customer. Throughout the conversation, Michael shares a model of forming a strong customer relationship that is simple and entirely attainable. It’s a crucial model, especially in this time of changing global markets and convergence. How does your company benefit your customers? Is that benefit immediately apparent to them? Listen to my conversation with Michael here:
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