Building a Customer Relationship: What's Your First Move?

SCENARIO: You're in a face-to-face meeting with a fully pre-qualified prospect.

Your challenge is to build a strong foundation for a long-term customer relationship.

Here are your choices:

• Strategy #1: Build Rapport. Keep the conversation on areas of casual interest. A friendly chat is the best way to begin to build a relationship.
• Strategy #2: Actively Listen. Ask an open-ended question and then actively listen to the answer. Ask further questions to clarify the situation.
• Strategy #3: Converse. Treat the meeting much as you'd treat a meeting with a peer or your manager. Talk about as much as you listen.
• Strategy #4: Interrogate. You don't want to waste the prospect's time so ask yes/no questions that will quickly determine whether or not you can help.

• #1: Build Rapport. If you selected this, you're confusing a sales call with social call. As a result, you'll become an acquaintance of the prospect, but you wont' build up any trust, credibility or rapport. Worst case, the prospect will simply think you're a lightweight.
• #2: Actively Listen. If you selected this, you're confusing selling with therapy. Some sales reps get so into questioning that they become entirely passive and non-reactive. The prospect gets drawn out, and the sales rep learns a great deal, but the sales rep never contributes anything and thus fails to build credibility.
• #4: Interrogate. If you selected this, you're confusing selling with police work. Some sales reps become so aggressive in their quest to uncover information that they start seeming like a junior investigator on a spin-off of the TV Show "The Closer."