Increasing Sales
In a recent survey, 47% of companies reported a need to improve their cross-selling and up-selling capabilities, 50% wanted to increase sales to other business units within their existing client companies, and 57% reported a need to nurture promising leads for the future. And while the vast majority of statistics about how many contacts it takes to make a sale seem to be made up, most of our anecdotal experience says you’ll have to reach out to people multiple times.
If you want to do any of these things well, people cannot suspect that you are trying to take advantage of them, and the best way to convince them that you’re not taking advantage of them is to (wait for it . . . ) try not to take advantage of them.
With better relationships you can make more contacts without being overbearing, sell more within an organization, nurture leads along, and have increased sales with happier customers. (We hate to use cliches, so we’ll just say it’s a “victory-victory” scenario.)