How to win in your industry:
Is it who you know or what you know that makes the difference?
How can you keep up with everything in today’s fast moving and continuously changing market? With the rapid advancement of technology and mass communications, it’s hard to know what you need to keep up with in order to succeed.
It’s not just about who you know or what you know that will make you thrive in your industry. Today you need the best of both worlds, you need both a relationship and a great product or service to truly win. A great relationship won’t help sell an inferior product or service but it will allow you win in a competitive situation with a comparable or exceptional offering. On the other hand, great products and services are everywhere and they can all be customized to compete with your superb product or service, in this case it is your relationship that will win.
How can you win in your industry?
Competition now comes from everywhere and through all channels. The need for positive and great relationships in more places across an entire organization has vividly increased. Now, an organization must be connected from the top-down and across to supply chain. For these connections to work successfully together from supply chain, procurement, HR, you must know not just one decision maker, but have a relationship with them all.
In most cases, you’ll need more than one relationship with a quality product to advance. The days are gone of buying a sub-quality product from your “good ole buddy” – but really, who had friends selling them a lesser product anyway!? It did, in fact, used to be more cut and dry–you walked through the door to make a sale to a friend and the process was simple and easy. Now, with the buying cycles and processes being more complex, you need to have that “good ole buddy” relationship with all decision makers, gatekeepers and influencers.
I think we can all agree there are not many CEO’s out there that would advocate to their business development teams that a great method of business would be to just operate blindly and to not have relationships with customers.
Everyone’s overall goal is to win in an efficient manner. There are, of course, times that you will lose as a course of a business but you want to always give yourself the best chance to win and maintain your great relationships.
The 5 Crucial Keys to Make Your Business Win:
There five keys I would suggest your business has in place:
Know your buyers
Follow the rules
Don’t sell to the wrong audience
Build the relationships that allow you to understand how to win
Make sure if you win everyone wins with you
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