Whatever route to market you’ve adopted or whatever sales process you follow, someone, somewhere has to make a personal decision whether or not to give your company business.

However, an observation is that many suppliers only talk about their customers as companies, rarely people. By doing this, already you are de-personalising that commercial relationship. This can lead to complacency, as will be revealed by the questions below; keep one specific customer in mind as you read through them:

Influencing (and showing you’re interested and care)

1. For this customer, how many people are we in contact with?
2. Who ultimately makes the decision whether or not to do business with us?
3. Who else influences that decision?
4. When was the last time we met each of them, either face to face or by video conference where we are most influential?
5. How much time in total have we actually spent with each of them in the last 12 months – excluding emails, texts and phone calls?

Adding Value

1. What is this customer trying to achieve this year?
2. What are their current challenges?
3. What opportunities do they have?
4. How do our products/services help them with each objective, challenge and opportunity?
5. How many times do they ask for our opinion or advice?

In summary, it’s a reasonable guess to say that you probably need to get much closer to the people who make and influence commercial decisions – because that’s exactly what your competitors are trying to do as you read this article. Don’t wait until either your key contact leaves or you lose business to a competitor; it’ll be too late to realise that maybe your key relationships weren’t strong enough.

Based on approaching 40 years’ experience of helping commercial teams to win, develop and keep more business, it would be worth exploring some of the options we offer.