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Building Business Relationships Course
Public Building Business Relationships Course
(Click here for Tailored Business Relationship Management)This one-day Public Building Business Relationships course is all about how you connect and engage with your client.
Building Business Relationships courses are run by Building Business Relationships is an intensive course that includes key elements of our Communication, Networking, Presentation and Body Language programmes.
You need to be a 'safe pair of hands' and at the same time have the skills to engender trust, understand your clients needs, get under the skin of what is going on their company.
Whether it's a 'beauty parade', a tender presentation, an informal meeting or a straightforward pitch for business, the better your relationship building skills, the better your chances are of convincing them to 'buy you'.
Click here for our Business Networking Course - Influencing and Negotiating Skills Course - Writing Winning Tenders Course - Presentation Skills Training Course - NEW Sales Training: Boosting Sales and Closing the Deal
Building Business Relationships Objectives
* Understanding relationship dynamics* It's You They Buy
* Creating empathy
* Using personal disclosure
* Effective questioning, not third degree
* Uncovering unspoken needs
* Dealing with disagreement
* Steering not pushing
* Gaining new confidence
Building Business Relationships Programme
The course content may include many of the exercises listed below, and any additional material that the trainers feel is relevant to the delegates on the day.Introduction to Impact Factory style or working
Here we introduce some of the essential ways we work and how they relate to our approach to building business relationships.Delegate Wants
Each delegate has the opportunity to say what he or she would like to take away from the day. We explain that we can adapt the programme to highlight certain areas they would like to focus on.
Creating Client Confidence
We start by looking at what goes into creating good business relationships with an open discussion on what gains clients trust and builds confidence.
We look at the difference between you and your company's 'offering' in the context that 'it's you they buy'.
The foundation for the day is laid with a brief look at what skills you need to achieve this: effective information gathering (rather than giving them the third degree), the 'teasing out' of relevant facts to help you understand their needs fully, how to discover what the best 'intervention' might be (rather than going in with pre-conceived ideas or simply accepting what the client says they need) and what’s needed in order to deliver, persuade and convince clients of proposals they may not want to hear (delivering difficult messages).
We end this section with a couple of questions:
What already goes well with clients?
What can go wrong with them?
It’s You They Buy
Each delegate will talk briefly about their communication style and what they think works for them. They will also talk about a good relationship they have with one of their clients and what is it that they do that makes the relationship successful.
They will then get feedback from their fellow delegates and the Impact Factory facilitators about how they are seen, concentrating on what already works.
Fact Finding Finesse: Teasing out the Information You Need
We will kick off this part of the session with a series of exercises designed to establish empathy.
Working in pairs we will look at the things that establish common ground between people. Some of the things to look at here are:
Deliberately using 'I', 'You', or 'We' statements
Here delegates learn to decide ahead of time the impact they want to make and shaping their statements to achieve that impact. For instance, there is a great deal of difference between the following:
"What you need to do is such and such..."
"I think an alternative approach might be..."
"Shall we look at some of the options we have..."
Any of these options are valid, but it's learning to choose the impact you want to make and then deliberately choosing which option to use.
Self-disclosure
It is a powerful tool to use a bit of self-disclosure to make yourself more approachable and also to open others up as well. We're not suggesting trotting out what you did over the weekend, but small nuggets that make you seem human is a great way to open up a conversation.
Demonstrating knowledge of their business
We know this sounds like common sense but unfortunately, it is something often overlooked when talking with clients. Here delegates will practise including something relevant about their clients as they talk about their own company, making links between the two.
Compliments
This requires delegates to know enough about their clients to find things to acknowledge them for and compliment on something they are already doing well.
Using their name
Again, this is common sense, but occasionally mentioning someone's name makes it feel more personal. We also look at avoiding using it too much so people don’t sound like sleazy salesmen.
Using their jargon and abbreviations
How to include the client's jargon while having a conversation.
Terms of Reference
We look here at how differently your clients may see things from the way you do. The real skill is being able to see a problem from someone else's vantage point and deal with it from that place, rather than trying to convince the other person that you're right and they're wrong.
We will take a current issue within each delegate's company and look at it from a variety of perspectives to see how dissimilar it can look to different people.
Assumptions
It is impossible not to make assumptions. However, it is often the case that people make things up (assumptions) and then act as though they are true. This exercise will look at some of the assumptions people made and how they made them.
We will ask for people to identify situations where they mis-read a client and what happened.
Effective Questioning
We have a belief at Impact Factory that goes like this: three questions in a row begins to look like the Spanish Inquisition, so you need to do something different, or in addition to just asking questions. People who are used to using their technical skills often find it difficult to demonstrate the 'softer' skills increasingly required to build better business relationships with clients and therefore build better business, so this section is designed to help people be more comfortable with their questioning skills.
Here we will run several client scenarios looking at gathering information in addition to asking questions.
What do you need to know?
We will introduce the idea of a checklist of specific needs to include:
What is the client asking of your company?
What are their key issues?
How do they make decisions?
Who is important?
Are there any underlying issues (hidden agendas)?
What is their history, if any, with your company?
Where do you think they might be coming from?
Understanding what happens in face-to-face communication
We unpick the dynamics that happen in face-to-face communication, including reading body language signals.
Asking questions: different types of questions
Open questions
Rhetorical questions
Leading questions
Closed questions
Schmoozing
Give them a reason to answer
Making 'soft' suggestions
Offering opportunities
Using pauses
The power of silence
Soft probing
'So what you're saying is...'
Unspoken needs
Finding out what the client is not telling you.
Here we will be running several scenarios where there is an unspoken, hidden or unrealised need that is not on the agenda.
We will look at drawing out and incorporating or responding to the needs in order to move the relationship forward.
This is particularly important to practise not taking the client at face value if you will. What we mean is that often it is easy to accept everything the client says even when you know there might be something else going on.
Dealing with Disagreement
This is a pairs exercise designed to show how de-motivating disagreement can be. Unfortunately, these common responses undermine client confidence instead of build it.
We will use one or more standard objections and examine the effects of:
Disagreeing
Telling
Agreeing in the "yes but" style
Then we will look at a variety of ways to instill client confidence and deal more effectively when you are not in agreement with the client without alienating them.
Agreeing and leaving silence
Agreeing, adding and handing back
Creating/engendering trust
Matching Intent to Impact
This is a simple model to look at how to choose the impact you want to make. Too often, we know that people can go into meetings very clear about what they want to get accomplished, but usually without thinking about how they want the other person/people to feel at the end of the meeting or consultation.
The Message the Client Doesn't Want to Hear
It is important to maintain a balance between not appearing too arrogant because of the knowledge the delegates have and not being intimidated by the client who thinks they know what they want.
This section looks at how to achieve that balance in delivering a difficult message while staying in charge of the arena and making the client feel taken care of.
Steering not Pushing
Carrying on from the previous exercise, we expand the work to look at how the consultants can use some of the exercises from the earlier part of the day to gently steer their clients to an appropriate decision, rather than pushing the right solution at them.
This is where their influencing skills have to be used with great tact. They may very well know what the 'right' solution is and it can be very tempting to push that solution. The alternative is that they back down and give in, which also isn't ideal.
This exercise will have the delegates dealing with some of the more difficult scenarios that they have encountered in the past and we will look at them with an eye of how they could be handled more effectively.
Summing Up and Seven Day Commitments
In the final exercise of the Building Business Relationships Course each delegate will give a brief presentation, which will include:
What you know they will use from the content of the day's work, that particularly suits your style
A commitment to put something specific into practise with one or more of your clients within seven days.
Public Business Relationship Management Course
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