Building relationships with customers is vital

Relationships in the IT business are vital if you want to sell something.  And that lesson is becoming more and more ingrained in me every day. 

My company hired me back in Sept-Oct 2006 timeframe as the first employee in the Houston office, and we got a sales guy not too long thereafter.  Our task has been to grow the territory almost from scratch.  So as we have started down that path, we have run into a few roadblocks where local IT consulting companies have great relationships with their customers, and those customers are less than willing to use someone new.  And while I respect that viewpoint, it is also very frustrating to someone trying to break in to those customers (of course, I say that at the same time I am trying to build those relationships to keep other companies out).

But we have had many successes down here, and I have discovered that the places we are most successful is where we go in and immediately build a level of rapport with the customer.  This can be done in a few ways. 

1. Honestly, sometimes it is actually just dumb luck.  I have one customer who happened to go to the same university that I did (this is not a common school like Texas A&M or UT or something like that, so it is more coincidental than you might think).  And the only reason I knew was because I saw his diploma at his desk.  When I mentioned it, he lit up, and we had a customer.  I have also met with customers who just happen to know someone I also know (the security industry is really quite small), and that often helps.
2. It often takes simple observation.  Like in number 1, where I saw the guys diploma, I look for clues to use as vectors for building a relationship.  Not too long ago we met with a guy whose haircut and demeanor told me immediately that he was either a current or former member of the military.  But just to be sure, I looked around his office.  And lo and behold, there were unit patches and other memorabilia around that proved my suspicions.  Being an old Army guy back in the 90's, I started asking him some questions about his military service.  Again, a rapport was built.
3. Another point on observation is to be attentive to the person as you talk to them.  If they seem bored or otherwise disinterested in your conversation, change tactics.  Be flexible.  Don't have one line and only one line.  Things need to be mixed up if the current tact isn't working.  But be careful.  This really takes a keen ability to judge a person.
4. Along those same lines, you have to make the potential client know that you can feel his or her pain.  If anecdotes or some technical humor can be thrown in (especially if you have some engineers in the room), it often breaks up the sales monotony and makes the potential customer realize that you can relate to what they are dealing with.

I am sure there are other approaches to this, but these are some of my observations over the last few months.  And when I think about them, these are things I knew about, but they are tings I admired from a customer point of view, so I never took them to heart thinking that I would be in the other seat across the table.  Maybe you can use some of these lessons in your next career move!