Building Customer Relationships Throughout the Selling Process

Building Customer Relationships Throughout the Selling Process

“The corporate mission statement guides an organization. It provides direction for strategy development and execution throughout the organization” (Ingram, LaForge, Avila, Schwepher. Jr., Williams 2004).

Customer relationships throughout the selling process can be built by following and representing the fundamentals of a mission statement. Key decision makers, from within corporate management and sales management to the actual customer, are integral factors throughout the selling process. From a consumer’s standpoint, what I’ve found to be most helpful to a company and their actions toward customers or customer relationships is ideally, communication, most notably through feedback.

In the article, “Re-Engineering Today's Core Business Process - Strong And Truthful Conversation,” Hollingworth states that “an honest exchange, mutual respect and no feeling of being judged is important to the business process” (¶ 3). Accepting and providing feedback while utilizing a decision-making process nurtures a mutual respect with an understanding that both the customer and company aren’t being judged, which may help to build honest relationships.

Feedback is critical throughout the selling process because it reflects performance and strengthens an individual or entity’s selling process. In order to systematically present an objective (i.e. selling), using a decision-making process of collecting, processing, and analyzing feedback is necessary. Collecting/gathering and providing feedback allows an individual or entity to process feedback so as to determine their options of action or approximate its outcome on a selling opportunity or selling problem; or process this information to understand it better, look at it from different perspectives, and provide feedback/input.

Fusing feedback throughout the selling process not only displays proper/beneficial results to the customer and the company, but to all parties involved or peripherally involved. In turn, throughout the displaying and disseminating process, which implements an approach and judgment of an objective, will allow all parties to evaluate an objective’s results with feedback and provide the customer or company the ability to follow up on the objective as required. Overall, feedback is not only critical to the selling process, but fundamental to a company’s mission of creating healthy relationships between the customer and company.
 
Reference:

Hollingworth, M. (2007). Re-engineering today's core business process - strong and truthful conversation. Ivey Business Journal Online.