Efforts Vs. Results: Relationship Selling

“Value The Relationship More Than The Quota.” – Jeff Gitomer

A remarkable transformation has been taken place in the sales techniques in last several decades. Those days have gone, whenever sellers & buyers met the intention was only to sale and therefore, sales efforts focused on selling products/services as much as possible. Instead, today the approach, the meeting formats and tones of a sales person have been evolved. Hard selling practice has been replaced mostly by Customer/Relationship focused selling. Relationship is in the heart of sales process. How we build and maintain the relationship with our customers bring out results. The more we, Sales professionals, gain credibility & trust, the more we get results and customers also appreciate the approach.

An interesting matrix "Efforts vs. Results" we need to understand to determine our sales approach. This matrix works at a simpler, yet powerful way to trigger our minds to evaluate and change our existing ways of working to build, maintain our relationship with customers. It’s helpful if we consider our attitude and the way we approach our work as we consider our business relationships. As outlined in the matrix below, the efforts we make and the results that we get are related. 

The 'Efforts vs. Results' matrix has four (04) quadrants as follows:

We get these four (04) quadrants against Effort/ Time (x- axis) and Results/ Outcomes (y- axis). The four quadrants are:

Quadrant I: Low Effort, Low Results: This quadrant we call 'Initiate' stage. In this stage we search for new prospects/ opportunities. As both the seller and the prospect do not know each other much, results/outcomes from this relationship/association will be obviously low.

Quadrant II: High Effort, Low Results: In this quadrant we start to "Build" our relationship with new prospects we explored in Quadrant I. How we do that? By building trust & credibility. We need to invest more times to this quadrant; as it takes more time & effort to build a trusted relationship.

Quadrant III: High Effort, High Results: The Quadrant is called "Manage" stage when we start getting results. Once our customers find us trustworthy and as their problem solver, we'll start getting results. The crucial job for the seller is to manage the relationship and focus on serving the customers by offering solutions.

Quadrant IV: Low Effort, High Results: This quadrant "Optimize" suggests that we invest our time & effort to grow the relationship with consistent results and problem solving. Our continuous efforts to maintain and grow the relationship will give us the consistent results.

The business of the business is making friends, and the business of all sales professionals is making friends and building relationships. Strategic friendships will make or break any business, no matter how big and no matter what kind of market. This matrix will give the sales professionals a guideline to change their sales focus onto their customers and building relationship to successful sales.

[The article was published on LinkedIn on 07 April, 2018]