10 Tips to Building Customer Relationships

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing the 10 relationships that a Sales Engineer needs to build to be successful (click here to check it out). This time around, I am sharing the top 10 tips on how a Sales Engineer can effectively build long-lasting relationships with customers. Sales Engineers need to build relationships with customers, there is no doubt about that. Once a relationship is built, customers would be more willing to talk to SEs and to share information with them. If SEs don’t put the effort into building relationships, customers will be far less likely to share information with them, and if all things are equal, there is no reason to compel the customer not to buy from the competition. As Anthony Iannarino of The Sales Blog says, “Dig your well before you are thirsty”, and I couldn’t agree more.

Now that we’ve covered the why, here are the top 10 tips on how to build fruitful relationships with our customers:

1- Know your stuff

A Sales Engineer is first and foremost an engineer. Engineers should know the technology that they are talking about. If they don’t know the answer to a question, engineers don’t make up an answer, they go and find them.

I understand that there are generalists that are not versed with every product that they sell. I am one of them. But I know who to contact to get the information. I make sure to inform myself before meeting the customer about the topic in question, and after talking to the specialists to understand the solution.

2- Be Responsive

Customers need answers. They are usually aware that Sales Engineers travel, get stuck in flights, may not know the answers off the top of their heads. They do however expect, in my opinion, to hear back at some point within the same day or early the next day that the email was received and will be responded to.

A good Sales Engineer wants to make the customer feels important to them since they are. The best way is to respond to an email during the time block set aside to answering emails. It does not have to be a long or complicated email. It could be as simple as:

“Hey Tom, I’ve received your email and I’m looking into it. I’m in meetings all day, is it ok if I get back to you with an answer tomorrow?”

Or

“Hey John, thanks for reaching out. I’m checking with our product management team and will get back to you shortly. Is there a timeline where you need this?”

Tom and John are fictional characters and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

The big problem that I faced early in my career is after sending this type of email, I had no way to remind myself that I have an open task. I would send the initial “I will get back to you” email, would fail to do so, and then the customer would follow up with me. After trying to remedy the situation through multiple means, I just started adding an appointment on my calendar to keep track of open tasks (check out this Time and Task Management blog for more info).

As a summary, being responsive is letting the customer know that the message has been received, then providing an answer to close the task.

3- Visit Customers as much as possible

Out of sight, out of mind. Customers usually turn to the people they feel most comfortable with to ask them questions. Have you been in a situation where your customer needed help, but they were hesitant to ask for it since they didn’t like the person they were going to ask, or just did not feel like they knew them enough?

Visiting customers allows Sales Engineers to chat with them about topics other than just work. Family, hobbies, and just joking around enables customers to see the SEs as more than just people who are trying to sell to them, but also as friends and even confidants. I’ve been in situations where customers tell me the problems they are having at home, or vent about a situation they are going through. None of that would have happened to me if I didn’t consistently visit my customers.

I do recognize that I’m lucky. I don’t have to travel anywhere, and all my customers are within a 5-mile radius of each other. If the SE has to travel, the phone is a powerful tool. The SE can pick up the phone, a few seconds later he or she could be speaking directly to a customer. No drive or flight required. Although it is not as effective as face to face, phone conversations can be similar to having a chat in person.

4- Don’t make your customer feel stupid (…as I said)

A sure fire way to get the customer to not like an SE is for the SE to make them feel stupid. There are obvious ways to make the customer feel that way. For example, if the customer asks a question about how to do something and the SE’s answer is “We did that together yesterday” or even more obvious “I thought you guys would know that already”. You would think that no one would actually say that, but I’ve heard such responses while I was in network design. SEs run the risk of customers not buying from them by making them feel stupid.

Others can be not so obvious. A pet peeve of mine, and hopefully of other people’s as well, is hearing someone respond to a question by saying “well, as I said…” and they go on to repeating the exact same answer. Aggh, this gives me the hibidibi jeebidies. Saying this implies, at least to me, that the customer is not smart enough to understand what you just said and that the SE is bothered to have to answer the same question again. The way I see it, the customer is not understanding my answer because:

1. I’m not understanding the question and I’m actually answering something else, so it’s time to clarify what the customer is really asking for; OR
2. I’m not explaining in a manner that would make sense to the customer. It is my job to do that and to reiterate in a way that they would understand.

Saying “as I said” adds nothing to the discussion. It just belittles and annoys people.

5- Be humble

If you’ve ever listened to Jocko Willink, a former Navy Seal and for lack of a better term, a leadership expert, on his podcast succinctly named Jocko Podcast, he loves the word “Dichotomy”. If you have never listened to his podcast, especially if you are interested in leadership as a topic, I would encourage you to check him out!

In any case, there is a “Dichotomy” to being a Sales Engineer. A Sales Engineer needs to show confidence without being cocky. As a colleague of mine says, she is always proud of herself, but she is also humble to ask for help. There is a balance there. When we talk to customers, we are the experts in what we sell, but we have so much to learn about what they do and their business.  

6- Ask the customer to teach you

Some customers are so proud of what they do, that they really want to talk about it. It also works to the Sales Engineer’s advantage, as they learn more about what the customer does, what they are proud of, and what they would like to fix. I’ve done this on a few occasions, and when I have, the customer’s eyes light up and he goes into full explanation mode of something that he is very proud of. We would then spend a long time chatting about it, brainstorming, and learning from each other. In my experience, this works better one-on-one with a customer, than in a group setting.

7- Be helpful

I struggled to write anything about this point. Seems very self-explanatory. If a customer needs anything, helping them can go a long way. This especially works if it does not take a long time and would not require a lot of additional resources. Spending a bit of time with the customer, shoulder to shoulder working on a project or answering questions is very useful in terms of building relationships.

I do want to mention that there is a not-so-thin line between being helpful and being taken advantage of. I’ve had customers attempt to make me do their work, either by asking me to fiber up some of their equipment (fiber up is a networking term which means connecting equipment together using fiber optics) while they go to lunch, or do full configurations for them that would take days. Well, it’s safe to say that I nipped that in the butt.

8- Care/Be empathetic

I’m going to say something that hopefully is not controversial. Customers are humans first. They also have lives that go beyond the office. Just like the rest of us, they have their own set of problems and challenges, and on the flip side, they also have their good days, celebrations, etc.  SEs may not have a relationship with a customer to help them move into a new home or visit them at the hospital if they are ill. At the very least, care that they are moving or have been going through a rough time, and follow-up on it.

9- Hang out with your customers  

Go out to lunch, dinner, or have drinks. Go paintballing and let them shoot you often, although I would never do that. I’m too competitive. What I’m trying to say is spend time with them outside of work. It might be difficult in some areas, as people would rather go home and spend time with their families after work, or have too much to do during work. However, trying to get them outside the office does wonders to strengthen the relationships, especially if the conversation is not all about work.

10 – Don’t badmouth the competition

There are so many reasons not to badmouth the competition. Here are a few:

1- The information provided by the competitive analyses provided to the sales team may be incorrect or outdated. Mentioning that a competitor does not support a feature when they actually do will cause the sales team to lose credibility.

2- The customer may be a proponent of the competition, so badmouthing it will actually insult them and put them on the defensive. This makes the SE’s job a lot harder to convince the customer to switch.

3- The competitor might be interested in hiring the SE. If the SE badmouths them, the job opportunity disappears if the competitor hears about it.

As a summary, there are so many ways that SEs can build a relationship with their customers. The base of that is technical knowledge, and then everything else can be built on top of that.

What are some of the techniques that you use to build relationships today?