Building Long-Term Client Relationships: Key Strategies for Sales Success (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Long-term clients are the key to your growth. The problem is, if I'm a sales, I'm always looking out for new. New is a goldmine, right? And that's where you're completely wrong. New is not always the goldmine. What you need is to have your existing customers where you already have gained trust. You need to keep them, get them happy, and upsell more product or services to them. My name is Michael Hamlet, and I want you to win in sales. So how do we build long-term relationships? One, it's obvious the customer should be happy, but happy is vague because in every relationship, there is some trouble, right? So what I've learned over the 25 years I've been head of global sales in multiple companies is every single time when there was a problem, people will respect proactivity. Me phoning them up upfront and saying, hey, something's wrong from our side. Here is how we will fix it. It's going to be a tough discussion, but they will always respect it. And I've seen over a longer period of time, they will remain customers because your communication is very, very clear. So one, be upfront, tell them something's wrong. Two, just keep communicating. It sounds obvious, right? It sounds obvious, but in our daily business, we never have time to do that. So just me phoning up the phone and saying, hey, this is where we are. This is where we're going. I know we're late. That type of communication works really, really, really well. And three, of course, long-term means you need to be in a proper partnership. That means you also need to give at a certain stage. So one of the things I try to do is with the customers, we work a lot and we're growing a lot. I also incorporate them into my marketing. So it becomes a win-win. I'll, for instance, say, hey, I know you're scaling a new product. So why don't we do a use case together? Let me push you. Let me help you build that business. That works really, really well. And fourthly, as last tip, at least once or twice a year, you just phone them up or you just go there. It has to be something physically where you just ask them the question, how are you doing? How is your business going? Doing that is really good. And the intention should not be to sell. The intention should be to really ask how they're doing and to listen. And every single time when it happens, somebody says, oh, it's good that you phoned because I was thinking of and off you go. So long-term relationship always has two components for me. It is trust and it is communication. Do that and you will win way more business over time. If you want to learn how in 30 seconds, check out my next video.