How to Build Valuable Relationships With Your Clients

Welcome to the 60 Second Sales Show.

I am Dave Lorenzo, your host. I'm the guy who helps you make a great living and live a great life. Today we're here to help you create deep, lifelong relationships with your clients, in 60 seconds or less.

Increasing sales requires you to create a sense of urgency among your clients. Creating a sense of urgency is not something that comes naturally.

I want you, now, to picture a big fat guy sitting on a couch at home in the middle of a snowstorm. He's sitting there eating a bag of potato chips. He's got them and he's throwing them into his mouth, one after the other. Your job is to get that big fat guy off the couch, get him to run out the door into the snowstorm to buy the product that you're selling. We're going to show you how to do that right now, here, today, on the 60 Second Sales Show. The best way you can do that is to motivate the person to act in his or her own self-interests.

Way back when, about ten years ago, when I was a partner at The Gallup Organization, my boss came to me. The CEO of the company walks into my office and he sits down in the chair and he says, "Dave, listen. I have something I want you to do and it's something that's really personal to me". I sat up, I leaned forward, and I was listening intently as he described to me a situation in which his brother in law, his ex brother in law, the guy who had just divorced his sister, had stolen one of his most prized accounts. The account was Ann Taylor stores. It was a clothing retailer. He described to me the pain he felt when his brother in law not only humiliated his sister by divorcing her, but also stole his account. He said to me, "I need you to do me this favor. I need you to drop what you're doing and go after this account as hard as you possibly can. I want you to land this account and if you do it in the next 60 days, I'm going to give you a $50,000 bonus".

You know and I know that money is a huge motivator for successful sales people, so I sat up in my chair and I said, "Boss, you can count on me. I'm on the case".

Keep in mind that this is a business, this is an industry, big ticket consulting, business to business consulting, which normally requires an 18-month to 2-year sales cycle. The minimum size account we would even bother to look at as a consulting organization is $1,000,000 in revenue to us on an annual basis. I just promised my boss I was going to do this in 60 days.

I looked around the room, just me there, and I said to myself, "How am I going to make this happen?" I went into my contacts file and I looked for people who had been to my speaking engagements in the past. I noticed there was one person from this company, one person from Ann Taylor stores, who had been to a speaking engagement in the past. I picked up the phone and I reached out her and I said, "I noticed you had come to see me speak. I'm wondering what resonated with you from that presentation".

She gave me a clue, she gave me an insight, as to how I could potentially help her.

She said to me, "What really resonated with me is that you talked about how diversity in our management team could increase sales in our organization. This is something we desperately need".

I said to her, "Wow". Her name was Allison. I said, "Allison, what's preventing you from making this happen?" She said, "I can't make the case. I can't make the case internally to my boss. I can't make the case to the CEO. The case is just too difficult". I said, at that point, "Allison, would you like some help with that?" She paused and she said, "Of course. I would love some help with that. What could you do to help me?"

At that point, we were off to the races. I knew I had her. I knew I had created an opportunity, but I didn't know whether or not we had a sens...