I got an email from an old friend recently… not that she would like me to describe her as old, which I’m not, but the friendship can be described as old, but not older than her, because that would mean we were friends in a previous life, which is taking things a bit far. Anyway, Belinda now lives in Australia, which is a few miles away from here in the UK and her recent email had - small world - in the subject field. Apparently she has just delivered some training down under to an old friend of mine… I’m not going there!… and expressed the surprise of it being a small world. Today, I get a call from Emanuel who lives in Sydney (it’s in Australia for those who are not good at geography) and he had read a number of my posts and materials on pipeline management and wanted to know more. We had a very interesting conversation and he seems to be doing some very new stuff with workflow in sales management… more about that another day… anyhow, we got on to the subject of talking about the fact that there are different business relationships in selling. I couldn’t agree more and was having the very same conversation with some customers of mine whom I happen to be visiting in Scotland yesterday… it’s an international topic you know, business relationships… so having this coincidence happening one day after the other has prompted me to write this post on business relationship.

The Four Business Relationships

I’m sure there are more than four, but I’ve settled on four and they fit very nicely into a both the pipeline management model and the Territory Analysis model I use. The four types are…

• Transactional
• Dependable
• Consultative
• Partnership

So what I thought I would do is share with you how I categorise each of these relationships under various headings. I’ll start this post with the first type of relationship and follow up over the next few days with the others.

Transactional Business Relationship

Relationship with Customer: Low level. Technical buyer. Depth of relationship weak to good.

Relationship Status: Commodity Supplier

Customer’s Knowledge of their situation and how Vendor can help: Excellent product knowledge. Knows requirements. Will have good grasp of required product or service.

Customer’s Risk Considered to be low: Customer will take responsibility for it.

Customer’s Expectations of Vendor: To attain the best price, lead time, payment terms, etc.

How the Customer Buys: Customer buys against purchase framework or calls direct with request or responds to marketing initiative.

Vendor’s Value to Customer: Choice of products, excellent quality, good prices, availability, support, ease of purchase.

Customer’s Value to Vendor: Low value in terms of individual deals. Transactional sales are the ‘bread & butter’.

Salesperson’s Value to Customer: Low, particularly if business is conducted across the web. If not web, then transactional business is often telephone based. Value in explaining choices, by making it easy for the customer to buy and by allowing the customer to negotiate favourable terms. Helpful relationship to customer.

Competitive Advantage: Compete on price, feature, function, lead time, availability, etc. Salesperson Value to own Business None if web based. If salesperson involved, then chance of differentiating choice against competition.

Role in Customer Process: From none to helping customer select right product.

So, that’s the transactional business relationship explained and as mentioned I’ll follow up over the next few days with the other three… and so it’s thanks to Emanuel for the prompt… which during my conversation with him it turns out that he used to work for Lucent in the UK and in a previous life (not a real life, but a previous job) I used to provide sales training to Lucent in the UK… our paths did not meet then… but it seems it’s a small world, particularly with those down under!

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