Sales or business development as it is commonly known as is nothing new, people have been selling to each other since the cave man. The difference between now is that relationships are increasing becoming important during the sales process. One just needs to look at the explosion of social media to see how valuable relationships are to the sales process.

This poses a problem because businesses tend to concentrate their efforts on gaining new business and not about meeting their current client needs. Current clients provide plenty of business development opportunities which can be leveraged to create additional revenue streams. How? Well if you have met the needs of your clients, trust will exist, therefore being able to up-sell or provide additional services is easy to implement. However, businesses often fail at this because they do not keep in contact with their clients on a regular basis. It’s imperative to stay in contact at least every three or six months,  as this helps to build the relationship and shows you value the client. It also helps to avoid the situation of a client feeling like they are only contacted when they are being ‘sold’ to.

What can my business do to develop relationship selling strategies?

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