Are your salespeople really building relationships? Most salespeople believe that they have a great relationship with their clients but if you ask them the following question, “What have you done in the past 30 days to build deeper relationships with your clients?” Most salespeople are not able to answer this question. You now have an opportunity to coach them to build and sustain their relationships with their clients. Relationship building is a nebulous and vague concept in selling.  If we don’t encourage specific action-based relationship building, then it becomes a concept more than a reality. Action-based relationship building is the key to success and salespeople will not take it upon themselves to do this on their own. 

Sales managers need to ask questions of their sales people to make sure that they are building relationships with their customers. The concept of relationship building must be action-oriented and using coaching questions is the first step in this process to drive awareness and give sales teams the answers they need to take action. Many salespeople have built a good rapport with their clients, but they need to take action in order to deepen their relationship and differentiate themselves from the competition. Here are a couple suggestions to build action-based relationships: 

1. Send a hand-written card
2. Send a book of interest
3. Send a video-based message
4. Give them ideas that may help them
5. Promote an event for them

Salespeople who individually take time and put forth effort to invest in action-based relationships will build much stronger relationships with their customers.