Building quality relationships and successful sales depends upon you!

We all want to have healthy, happy relationships with the people we know and love and meet every day. We all want to be successful in whatever we promote or sell each day. Whether we realize it or not, we are all constantly doing presentations to everyone we meet. Building strong connections can be hard work. I have come to see that if I desire to have a quality relationship or a good influence on someone, the majority of the responsibility will be mine. That does not totally relieve other people from their part. But, if I really want an interaction to succeed, I have to approach it and work at it as though everything depends upon me. Maybe an illustration will help.

When I am driving a car, there are other people all around me who are driving their cars, too. The other drivers are not primarily focused on me. They are focused on their own transportation needs. However, as far as the safety and progress of my own trip goes, it largely depends upon me. If I am alert and careful in traffic, I will have a better chance of being safe and moving forward to my desired destination. I cannot expect other people around me to make my trip successful.

The same is true in the world of sales.

You cannot determine how you go about selling on the basis of how you are feeling at the moment or what a potential prospect says or does not say. W. Clement Stone, author and one of the gurus of the PMA movement (Positive Mental Attitude) once said, “Sales are dependent upon the attitude of the salesperson – not the attitude of the prospect.” Again, that puts the burden back on me to work as though everything depends upon me. Oftentimes it will.

This is very similar to a relationship. As you are moving along in your relationships, you must approach the journey as though it depends upon you. How you act, what you say, your thoughtfulness, your kindness, your words of encouragement, and your attitude, all go into the process of making a relationship succeed or fail. I don’t know about you, but I want to be the kind of person that others are happy to see come, sad to see go, and excited about having back. Wouldn’t that be a great thing for someone to say about you? That would be a commentary worth all of us having!

Naturally there are different levels of closeness ranging from the casual acquaintance to that with a mate or family member. This week, why not step back and take a look at your relationships and the way you go about trying to connect with people? It might be a good idea to make a list and even break it down into two categories: close relationships and casual acquaintances. If you do not take the time and effort to determine who you want to be close with, I can assure you that it will never happen by accident.

Taking care of the people who take care of you

As I said earlier, close, warm, intimate relationships and friendships require time, effort and hard work. So do successful sales. The more you let your customer know you genuinely care about them the better off you will be. The old saying is still true: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care!”

Good connections with family, friend and business associates are painful at times but they are also very rewarding. If you want to have quality relationships in your life, put the burden back on you because that is the one area you can completely control. Start taking the necessary steps to say, act and do what it takes to connect in a healthy manner with other people. After all, in the end, connecting successfully with other people is what life is truly all about.

Taking the time to relate better with family, team members, employees and sales staff who in turn, is just good business sense. In doing so, you are taking care of the people who take care of you.