#025 Selling Through Partnering, with Fred Copestake

IN THIS EPISODEDo you tell your clients that you work in partnership? What evidence do you have to reassure them that the statement is, in fact, true? What are the qualities of a good partnership? Does your team possess the skills required to forge strong win:win relationships, built on trust, transparency, transparency, comfort with change and interdependence and a focus on the future? In this episode, I invite Fred Copestake, a sales consultant and trainer specialising in complex B2b sales environments, to get into this topic with me. He has spent the last 22 years travelling around the world to develop salespeople, in over 200 companies, to move from the transactional selling styles of yesteryear, into the collaborative selling styles of today and shaping the ‘business partners’ of the future. HIGHLIGHTS FROM THIS EPISODE:  As you will by now know, here at KAMGuru we are big believers in fostering a ‘valued partner’ relationship with your most important customers/clients. Partnering with your clients should be more than just a statement, more than something you simply ‘say’ on your website. It should be lived in the values, attitudes, behaviours, and skills within your teams and consistently demonstrated in your most important customer relationships. In my discussion with Fred, we dig into his concept of ‘PQ – Partnering intelligence’. (He has even written a book on it).  We talk about what the concept is, and what qualities we should be developing and demonstrating in our key account relationships. You will hear us talk through: The three biggest challenges that senior leaders will see when they look at their sales teams. As Fred describes - are your teams: Displaying ‘busy busy busy’ behaviours where busyness is getting in the way of business? Are they thinking in the ‘olde worlde’ ways and struggling to see new, and change, as a force for good and opportunity? Do they have a ‘muddled mindset’ where the focus switches as we get closer to month-end and the targets take over? How we n