Build and maintain sales relationships
Overview
This standard is about building and maintaining sales relationships. The standard is designed to enable you to build a strong relationship with your customers and understand their needs and expectations by working in partnership with them. This standard provides baseline for building and maintaining sales relationships through trust, commitment and co-operation designed to achieve long-term customers’ loyalty. This standard is for sales professionals who build and maintain sales relationships.
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
1. identify and prioritise customers with whom to build effective sales relationships
2. establish existing and potential customers’ needs and expectations and balance them with the organisation's sales strategy
3. agree with the customers how the relationship should operate and be maintained
4. develop a customer relationship plan based on agreements with them
5. ensure that the products’ and services’ offer is clearly defined in terms of customers’ needs and expectations
6. build a rapport with customers
7. negotiate with customers a range of mutually beneficial sales solutions
8. identify opportunities to develop the relationship with customers
9. identify and follow up appropriate opportunities for up-selling, cross-selling and selling add-ons
10. seek and collect customers’ feedback about the organisation's provision of products and services
11. use feedback to ensure that the quality and consistency of service is being maintained
12. deal with customers’ complaints or problems
13. ensure regular feedback is given to colleagues on the status of sales relationships
14. monitor and evaluate customer relationships on a regular basis
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
1. the current legal, ethical, political, technical, environmental and corporate social responsibility requirements for customer relationships
2. the quality and compliance considerations in relation to customer relationships
3. the methods of customer relationship management
4. your organisation’s criteria for establishing long-term and profitable customer relationships
5. the focus of the organisation’s sales strategy, sales activity plans, sales targets and sales objectives
6. how to identify and prioritise customers with whom the organisation should be building long-term and profitable relationships
7. the nature and scope of the relationship, its value and potential to the organisation
8. the content of a customer relationship plan and the information on which this is based
9. the interpersonal skills required to establish relationships and build rapport with customers
10. how to assess the risks and potential benefits of the customer relationships
11. how to communicate with key customers effectively to develop trust, commitment and co-operation
12. how to negotiate with customers to establish a mutually beneficial financial outcome from the relationship
13. the concepts of up-selling, cross-selling and selling add-ons and when it is appropriate to do this
14. the methods of monitoring and evaluating customer relationships
15. how to establish the level of resource required to manage customer relationships
16. the methods to identify and embrace sales opportunities when maintaining customer relationships