Creating value for your customers, prospects, and colleagues is perhaps the best Business gift you can give them. A particular set of business development and communication skills is the key. Do you and your team have them.
Related Articles
This time of year, especially, giving and receiving command a lot of attention. In business, we pursue these activities throughout the year, though perhaps more along the lines of “give and get” or “give and take.”
Unfortunately, business in general is too often perceived as emphasizing the getting rather than the giving. That’s not surprising, but is it fair? The common thread running through four key business-development functions—sales, negotiations, referrals, alignment—is in fact getting others to do what we want them to do. But there’s a lot more to the story.
“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’”
—Brian Tracy
Overlooked, we believe, is the simple truth that getting in business is made possible by the other, always-present force of giving or, from our perspective, creating value.
Sales, Negotiation, Referrals, and Alignment
Here are questions to ask yourself and your team for insight into how effective your sales skills and process really are. Do they help you provide real value during the sales process?
Sales
Are you as good at developing business as you are at doing your job?
Do you get your fair share of new business from referrals?
Do you sometimes feel that your sales process is designed to get prospects to buy something they don’t really need?
Negotiations
Have you or your team been in shouting matches, lost business, or disrupted personal relationships?
Do you end up compromising to reach superficial “win-win” settlements that might actually be losses?
Is negotiating so emotional for you that you are not comfortable or confident?
Referrals
Are you unsure about the best way to get referrals?
Is it uncomfortable–even impossible—for you to turn social interactions into business opportunities?
Do you have a repeatable process to generate referrals?
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Do sales and marketing sometimes operate as if one doesn’t know the other exists?
Do you know how much misalignment is costing you?
Are frequently crossed signals frustrating your employees, even the most committed?
Business simply can’t be conducted if all sides don’t give and receive—externally and internally. Business schools call it “exchanging value.” The conventional perspective is that a “fair exchange of value” can, and should be, the goal of selling, negotiation, referrals, and sales and marketing alignment. Sellers, buyers, and stakeholders should “win.”
“I now have confidence to ‘make rain’ without feeling I have manipulated or cajoled a prospect into becoming a client.”
—Graduate, FOCIS® Consultative Selling
We’ve learned—and we teach—how to take that conventional thinking a step further. As readers of this column and graduates of our FOCIS® consultative selling course know, our experience is that in selling—in fact, in all forms of business development–the best way to give value is to create it during the sales process. Value can also be created during the negotiation, referrals, and alignment processes by using essentially the same communication skills taught in FOCIS®.
After 28 years of helping companies and individuals increase the topline, we’ve developed highly effective solutions to specific challenges in all four areas, including courses designed to develop and improve skills and to increase performance.
The common thread? Building your ability to give the “best business gift ever” in this, or any season. We teach you how to create value in nearly every business interaction, whether brief or extended, and to ensure that customers, prospects, and colleagues recognize and appreciate that value.
In addition, we’ve developed a complimentary, 30-to-60 minute process to determine with you which of those solutions, if any, might meet your needs. The assessment process alone delivers real value—often eye-opening—by examining your concerns from a perspective you probably haven’t ever taken.
To learn more about creating value during the business development process, just get in touch with me at 847-446-0008, Extension 1, or pkrone@productivestrategies.
The post The Best Business Gift Ever? Creating Value in 2022 appeared first on Productive Strategies, Inc..
