Creating A Vision to Build Your Sales Relationships

Do you have long term clients? Do you feel your clients are loyal to you and your product? Do you know exactly what your clients and prospects will need in 2021? 

 

This is the perfect time of year to think about the type of sales relationships you want to create for 2021. If you are not getting the results you want or you want to increase your success in the coming year, it is imperative you know exactly what kind of relationships you need to reach your goals. 

 

Look at the sales relationship you have and the ones you want to have. Do you understand exactly what they need? The goal is to create a clear, concise vision for exactly what you want your 2021 sales relationships to look like so you attract exactly what you want. 

 

Working with vision and relationships is not only seeing how the outcome affects you but also starting to see what outcome you want for your clients. This will naturally increase your passion as you start to visualize the type of client you want, the interaction that will follow, and the needs that will be met.

 

Visualize a client interaction, then dissect it by creating a list of possible questions to help you uncover helpful information to learn more about them and how you can be of helpful service. 

 

Develop a true desire to know your audience and begin to operate out of service to those with whom you speak. The integrity in your willingness to hear them out and offer them something that meets a specific need they have shared with you will be the very thing that seals the deal. When turning the power of vision upon your client relationships, you will need to stretch that mental story and start seeing how your reasons include meeting their needs.

 

Before your next appointment, take a moment to visualize the entire conversation. See yourself sitting with someone new. Remember that effective visualization brings in all five senses, so really take a moment to create what is around you. How does it make you feel?

Is it warm or do you feel cool and collected? Can you see yourself? Are you sitting upright? Rigid or comfortable? When you speak, are your words clear and friendly? Is the client open and receptive to your ideas? Can you feel a true interest inside yourself to discover who they are and how you can best help them? If the conversation in your vision is not flowing in your mind, it’s likely it won’t be easy in real life either.

 

The best sales relationships are created through conversations that reach inside an individual’s life and mind and show them how to apply what you have directly to their situation. Pay attention to the intention in your visualization. Don’t make closing the sale your priority. Instead, make the person your priority. Feel their value and let this drive you to meet their needs or desires with your product or service.

 

Remember, you are only half of the equation. To be successful in sales, you need the other person. They must trust who you are and see the benefit of what you have, and the only way to do that is to build a relationship through active listening and genuine care. Start to see the type of person you want to speak with. Hear their words and stories in your mind and feel how you will respond. Through the practice of visualization, you can prepare yourself for what is to come.

 

Your vision is created first as a target for your conscious and unconscious mind to shoot for; however, it’s the result of the real-life person-to-person exchange that is the true measure of your sales relationships. To quantify your sales relationships and learn from the experiences, you must become clear on what results you are looking for and what the emotional drivers are behind those results. On an unconscious level, we tend to make decisions that are driven by either moving away from pain or moving toward pleasure, which directly impacts the results we experience.

 

To get the results you want, begin by setting clear relationship goals and then compare and contrast the outcomes.

 

There is nothing more powerful in any relationship than emotions. So, begin by writing down your emotional drivers behind building successful relationships. This means understanding how it makes you feel and why you want to feel that way. Draw two columns on your paper and put “Pain” at the top of one, and “Pleasure” at the top of the other. Then, list your emotional drivers that lead you toward pleasure and the ones that lead you away from pain. The column that has the most emotions in it will show your primary emotional motivation, toward pleasure or away from pain. This will serve as a foundational guide in creating the results you want most in your client interactions. If you’re motivated toward pleasure, you’re focused on how great things are going to be when you reach those results. When you’re motivated away from pain, your mind might be focused more on what you don’t want.

 

Now you get to dig deep and ask yourself what you want in your relationships. Hopefully words like integrity, beneficial, trustworthy, reliable, and long-term are popping into your head. Your results need to be driven by the big picture of your vision. 

 

Write a minimum of three goals you have for each and every sales interaction. Post them in a place where you can see them to remind yourself of your desired outcomes when you speak with a client or prospect.

 

Once your goals and emotional drivers are clear, you will know how to analyze your results. Look back on two particularly memorable client interactions, one positive and one negative. When applying your current goals and the emotions that you held, what can you learn from the exchange? What feelings do you still hold around it? Are you proud? Do you feel like a success? Did you stay aligned with your integrity?

 

As you analyze these two experiences, you’ll develop a feel for the process of reflection and comparison with goals and outcomes. Before your next meeting, get clear on your goals and aim for the outcome.

 

What happens person-to-person and whether it aligns with your vision is what will teach you and eventually grow your business. Always go back over the exchange to find ways to continually improve for the future. Keeping your goals top of mind will help you maintain your focus on serving your clients in the best way possible, leading to beautiful, long-term relationships.

 

It’s time now to uncover your Purpose behind your sales relationships. This is the big “WHY”? What is all this hard work for? It’s time to go to your inner intentions and primary motivators that go past your emotional drivers and into what feeds your will and passion. These two can be incentivized by pleasure and pain, but they are not as fleeting as feelings. These are the values you cultivate in sales relationships, coupled with why you need them.

 

When you define your purpose, you have more passion and drive to fuel your time and effort. Through more time and effort, you have more chances of success, and with more success, you create a reciprocal cycle. Purpose is the compelling “why” behind all that you do.

 

Go back to your vision, goals, and desired outcomes that you created around your client relationships. Now, get out your pen and paper and write a detailed purpose.

 

Consider writing your purpose from both intrapersonal and interpersonal perspectives. Begin with your relationship with yourself. Hopefully this is the easiest one! Write freely about what type of connection you want to have within. It is important that you stay honest with yourself and see things clearly. Is your goal with yourself to be an ample provider, to enjoy your job, or to live with enthusiasm? What aspects of your relationship with yourself directly correspond with who you are at work? What is the force that drives you to show up day after day and continue to search out new connections and potential customers? What is your motivation for developing successful sales relationships?

 

Now write about what it will cost you if you don’t achieve your results. What will you lose? And how will your life be different if you don’t follow through?

 

If you write down a goal to always walk in integrity with yourself, then your driving purpose may be acknowledging your personal truth. This conviction to stay honest with yourself is the purpose behind your integrity.

 

Next, go through the same exercise by looking at your goals with your clients and prospects. To get to your purpose, ask yourself, “What does my perfect client relationship look like? What is the ultimate outcome of the exchange?” Using these answers and the goals you’ve written out will help you get crystal clear on the purpose behind your goals!

 

Writing out a detailed purpose may seem like a lot, but now you can draw correlations and similarities between your intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. When a purpose becomes cross-functional, it grows stronger.

 

It is only through having a clearly defined purpose that you will find the strength and resolve to stay true to yourself and create the relationships you desire! Your fundamental purpose will be there even when your emotions, your luck, or your work ethic take the day off. When you know the why behind what you are doing, there is nothing that can stop you! 

To learn more about developing your vision and purpose, join the most dynamic and powerful sales mastermind group in the world