With tools aplenty for uncovering and nurturing leads, converting those leads to customers and more, today’s sales ecosystem smacks of technological sophistication.
In between it all, though, human relationships are the complementary driving force to keep everything in motion.
“Everything we do as humans starts with connection. We crave connection. No one wants to do business with someone they don’t know or trust,” said Route Sales Manager Kelsie Stonehocker.
And in sales, paring it back to the basics can be powerful.
“Our approach is very simple: be human and be likable,” NINJIO Director of Sales Kevin Baroudi noted.
Below, Stonehocker, Baroudi and ChowNow Senior Manager of Channel Partnerships Riki Allen unpacked the sales approach that pays off for them and their teams.
ChowNow lets people order food via its app, which doesn't charge a commission to restaurants. It can also offer marketing support via capabilities like membership programs and email marketing.
Why is it important to you and your team to prioritize building meaningful connections with customers?
In a world filled with advertising noise and lots of empty promises, we believe it is imperative to build true connections with our partners in order to ensure that we both mutually see success. As a mission-driven company, we prioritize the well-being of our customers over profit.
We believe it is imperative to build true connections with our partners in order to ensure that we both mutually see success.”
An important part of that is partnering with companies that also align with our mission. The more meaningful connections we can build and the more we can expand our understanding of one another, the more we are able to identify new ways to grow and uphold that mission together.
What is one method or approach you’ve successfully used to create memorable interactions with customers?
The ways that we’ve begun to create memorable interactions with partners has varied, but at the end of the day it is taking time to ask meaningful questions and listen to the answers. That means taking time at the beginning of calls to talk about things outside of the agenda.
In conjunction with that, we’ve also created events and opportunities to spend time with partners socially with things like happy hours and lunches. These allow us to see each other outside of the professional confines and place humanity first and foremost. We can begin to see one another as a complete person.
How do you encourage authenticity and personalized connections among your sales team?
Our team is given a budget to spend on events and personalized gifts for partners. When they see fit, they are able to send a gift — over the holidays, to celebrate major life milestones or to help with something that the partner needs. They can also plan events that will be authentic to the partnership they have built together. It’s important to allow the team to create their own connections based on authenticity and give them the autonomy to develop and grow those relationships as needed.
NINJIO employs animated video to inform and educate companies and individuals on cybersecurity.
Why is it important to you and your team to prioritize building meaningful connections with customers?
Without establishing trust and making meaningful connections, we lose the ability and foresight to build a successful program that will help our clients achieve their goals. Once trust is established, truth follows, and truth is what leads our team to identify, plan and execute on a program that is tailor made to fit our client’s needs.
Buyers today are extremely educated, and we must recognize and respect that. Prior to engaging with NINJIO, they often conduct extensive research and come prepared with detailed explanations of how they envision our program working within their organizations.
Buyers today are extremely educated, and we must recognize and respect that.”
Our job at NINJIO is to be trusted advisors to our clients. We work in synergy to align on the root cause of their problems and agree on tangible solutions to help them achieve their organizational goals. They come to us with all the pieces of the puzzle, and we help them put the puzzle together. We act as an extension of their business with their best interests always top of mind.
What is one method or approach you've successfully used to create memorable interactions with customers?
There are many different sales strategies today, from the Challenger Sales Model, to Gap Selling, to SPIN Selling; the list goes on. What we have found is that there is nothing more powerful than connecting with our clients on a deeper level and showing them how we can make their lives better.
Occam’s Razor principle tells us that when faced with multiple explanations for a given scenario, the simplest is often the correct one. When a prospective client engages us and shows genuine interest in what we have to offer but fails to respond to post-meeting follow-ups, it’s not likely that they have forgotten about us, or moved on to another vendor, or dropped off the face of the earth. It’s more likely that they have other priorities to manage and will soon re-engage. I always remind my team that we must remain pleasant, patient and persistent, and ask the right questions when we have the client’s full attention. When we understand their journey, we can better plan ours, and the outcome is unequivocally an appreciative and satisfied client who is prepared to work with NINJIO for the foreseeable future.
How do you encourage authenticity and personalized connections among your sales team?
Treat people the way you want to be treated, but also the way you want them to treat others.
I encourage authenticity and personalized connections by providing these same characteristics to my team. When they are led with respect, empathy, transparency and integrity, they mirror these values on the clients they work with every day. While it sounds simple on paper, it’s much more difficult in practice, especially during times when business is more challenging. Consistency is key here, and through the ebbs and flows of business, we must remain true to our core values and principles.
A healthy salesperson-to-client relationship starts internally, and when the internal relationship is built on these pillars, the external relationships flourish.
Route seeks to improve the e-commerce experience through an app that enables shoppers and businesses to track ordered packages.
Why is it important to you and your team to prioritize building meaningful connections with customers?
Everything we do as humans starts with connection. We crave connection. No one wants to do business with someone they don’t know or trust. Connecting allows everyone involved to have a very open, transparent and authentic conversation without walls or defenses up. This ensures we are doing right by the potential client, the company and ourselves.
No one wants to do business with someone they don't know or trust.”
At the end of the day, our intention is to ensure Route is the right fit for anyone we come into contact with. We have found that the best way to show prospects we genuinely and authentically care comes down to building these strong connections. We are passionate about the e-commerce industry, and we are passionate about discovering what prospects have accomplished in this space. We love getting to know their stories, what their challenges are and how we can help.
What is one method or approach you’ve successfully used to create memorable interactions with customers?
I love hearing brands’ stories, how they got into the business and why they started. I happen to be an avid online shopper myself, so from a consumer’s perspective, I’ve come to truly understand the industry’s strengths and weaknesses. Before every call I research their brand — what they are doing for digital marketing, what is important to them, how they present themselves on social media and how they speak with their audience. This initial research means that right off the bat, we can dive into a meaningful, collaborative conversation. This leads to customers being very open with me and sets them at ease because everyone feels we’re on the same team.
Recently, we had a client who was already using a competitor, and at first thought they were all set. Through our conversation, they became open to seeing our whole offering and how we’re differentiated from competitors. On the call, we could tell their defenses were a bit up — maybe they had a past bad experience; we weren’t sure. We kept the call very conversational, no pressure. We showed them how our post-purchase experience will elevate their customer journey while streamlining their internal processes.
We showed them the entire solution while explaining the “why” along the way. By the end of the call, they really started to open up about the struggles they were facing and why they were open to taking the call. We built a genuine and authentic connection with them. We talked about how much we genuinely believe in brands like theirs and love seeing their growth. Since that initial conversation, we’ve established a trusted partnership and helped them every step of the way in onboarding with Route!
How do you encourage authenticity and personalized connections among your sales team?
I tell my team to look for brands that they’d want to shop from. Find something on their site you’d actually want to buy. This gets them genuinely excited about working with the brand and that excitement translates to the customer. People can sense when you are trying to buffalo them. One of my favorite things about working for Route is that we do not have to overhype the value we drive for our customers — our product actually does deliver on what we say it can do. We truly are helping the industry improve their customer experience, and it’s so exciting.
