Deliver generosity for better results

“Start by keeping these two things foremost:
1. Find a way to help. 2. Find a way to care.”

- Keith Ferrazzi

When Sales and Marketing work together from first touch, you see exceptional things happen. In the previous post we explained the key objective of putting the “R” in CRM, using the power of building relationships to outflank your competitors’ generic sales approach. Marketing stops stuffing the pipeline with cold contacts, replacing raw, disintermediated quantity with viable leads they know some valuable things about. The leads are not titles and contact information, but people, individuals with real aspirations at work and at home, aspirations you can help them reach for their benefit…and yours.

The mutual benefit flowers because the prospect sees you not as just another widget slinger, but differently, as an individual earning a place as a trusted partner. It’s almost universal: People do business with people they know and like. And it’s easy for individuals to like the people who focus on their success.

Here’s how. Marketing starts the process by doing the homework. The assignment goes beyond the usual research on the company and its need for what you're selling. It explores the human prospect; the team finds personal ways to show you care and are focused on their personal and professional success.

Ideally, Marketing is able to locate a mutual connection on LinkedIn or by exploring your organization's collective network, someone who can provide background and, better yet, a warm introduction along the lines of: "Hi, I thought you should talk to these guys. They've helped me out a great deal and I think they might be able to help you."

At a minimum, the Marketing team should acquire and pass information about the lead that will help Sales make a personal connection. You're looking to strike a chord that gives you both a reason to care.

In the personalized outreach that follows, you or Marketing provides something generous as part of the request for a meeting. It might be an article or book germane to the prospect’s current business challenges, completely independent of what you're selling.

From that very first Marketing touch, you set the expectation with the customer that you're focused on their success. The customer knows that you'll consider the call Marketing has just set up a success if it advances your customers' cause and builds the relationship, not just if it closes a transaction.

When Marketing passes the relationship (notice, it’s not a “lead”, it’s a “relationship”) to Sales, the foundation for generosity is already started. It is the Relational Capital required to craft a list of five ways to make the person you're meeting successful and put that list into Sales’ hands. That's what's going to arrest people's attention and make them willing to develop a closer relationship with you.

What comes next? Five Packets of Generosity. Use the proven process of delivering Five Packets of Generosity as part of the meeting, a mix of offerings that will be valued by the customer and her organization. No more than one or two of them should focus on the value you'll deliver in an eventual transaction. The rest are personal packets, not related to a product or service.

Marketing has already started the process by delivering a preliminary packet and, hopefully, learned more in the conversation that resulted in the meeting. Use that intelligence, but also dig deeper into the homework looking for a way to help, a way to show care and concern. At the departmental level, it could be a connection to an expert in your network or your organization's network who has successfully dealt with an issue your research showed the prospect is facing. On the individual level, it could be as simple as understanding the prospect’s personal ambitions or what they share with you, such as shared hobbies, parenthood, causes or other interests.

And what if research findings aren’t available because, for example, the target is a new employee or it’s a privately-owned organization that operates in stealth mode? You can fall back to some deeply-held personal interests of your own. Talking about them will humanize you, so you don’t seem like a JASP (just another sales person) pushing a service or widget.

To the customer, it looks and feels more like working alongside teammates than it does being pitched.

If You Can Measure it, You Can Manage it: RQ

A key step for tracking your contacts in your CRM process and in your head is to regularly stay in touch with your prospects’ RQ, their Relationship Quality score.

Just as the traditional sales funnel conducts contacts from acquisition to close, the successful relationship sales pipeline advances people from low to higher RQ scores. The point is to apply generosity as a way to help you move the score steadily up. Greenlight Research Group's investigation of hundreds of Relationship Account Strategy engagements conducted by its parent company Ferrazzi Greenlight confirms higher RQ correlates with quicker and bigger sales.

RQ is not the only measure we advise you track, but it’s the key to the competitive advantage. See the table for Ferrazzi Greenlight's proven and recommended scale to score the people you partner with.

Relationship Quality Score Criteria

If you implement RQ in your CRM system, keeping track of targets’ scores and keeping the team focused on taking the actions necessary to legitimately advance targets towards higher scores, research shows you’ll close a higher percentage of your contacts and for bigger deals. Advanced practitioners can even store an rMap (a graphic that maps relationships) as part of the prospective organization's record. An rMap shows the overall status of the relationships important to the mutual success of your organizations. An application that produces rMaps is available free from Ferrazzi Greenlight.

Note that keeping track of Relationship Scores does not mean you should “keep score” as you lead with generosity. Don't think of your generosity as part of a tit-for-tat, favor-for-sale. The quick summary of a study by Stanford's Frank Flynn shows what your mindset should be.

But Before You Can Schuss-boom…

If your organization is like most, Marketing and Sales are more aloof from each other (or even adversarial) than they are a smoothly-functioning high-impact team. And since acting as a team is critical for Sales and Marketing’s efforts to advance Relationship Quality, you will almost certainly need to work on improving the integration and collaboration of your Sales and Marketing groups.

Before we cover a swathe of research on the performance advantages of and barriers to that teamwork, here are some links to tools for building relational capital and the more detail on the practice of using Five Packets of Generosity to advance the sale. This video featuring Keith Ferrazzi is a great kick-start to get you on your way.