Mark Phillips, the Founder and Board Chair at HireEducation, shares his thoughts on the power of relationships in sales in a stimulating conversation with John Golden on the SalesPOP! podcast. Learn more about how building authentic relationships lays the foundation for successful sales. You can listen to the full episode here, and/or read a summary of Mark’s comments below.

SalesPOP! is a modern digital magazine aimed at empowering sales leaders, sales management, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs to succeed and learn how to be more successful in sales. In this conversation, John and Mark discuss the significance of relationships in sales.

Why do relationships matter in sales?

Mark notes that relationships are central to getting anything done and points out that no complex sales happen without solid relationships, particularly in B2B transactions and significant software purchases. He explains, “If it’s complex, if the deal involves a significant portion of a budget or a large buying constituency or if it’s a highly technical product, I would argue that any sale that gets done has a strong foundation of relationship.”

The evolution of relationship-based selling

When Mark started in sales in the late 90s/early 2000s, it was all about enterprise sales and value-driven selling. He says “there was a perception that relationship sales was cheap and easy and it was just a backslapping person with a with a real Rolodex—an actual Rolodex—and along come these methodologies [such as Miller Heiman and SPIN]…that really tried to look at things through a different lens.” While the new programs helped salespeople build trust and cultivate relationships, in the end it comes down to the idea that humans are buying from humans, so trustworthiness and long-term relationships/engagements are the key to business success.

Developing long-term relationships in sales

As Mark puts it, “It’s a lot harder to get a new client than it is to keep an existing one. I think the last time we looked at this …something like 80% of our business comes from people we’ve done business with before. …The business context and the health of the business is far bigger than just, ‘Do I get this deal, or do I not get this deal?’ …[When] I connect with somebody and treat them like a human being and am genuinely curious about them and their career priorities and life priorities, but they aren’t looking [for a new job] and aren’t interested and can’t be swayed from a job right now. … if we stay in touch with that single person and continue to engage with them and build that relationship, we’re likely to be at the top of the pile where we’re likely to be the first person they call when the time does come.” It’s a long game.

Authentic relationships aren’t just randomly spending time with people – you still have to be judicious with your time. You can build a meaningful, sincere, legit relationship with someone with just a few touchpoints a year. For example, shake hands and say hello at a conference once or twice a year. It doesn’t have to be a huge time investment to be meaningful and authentic.

Adapting to virtual workforces and relationship-building

Back in the day, the main KPI was phone time. Mark says that when he came up as a recruiter, “Number of dials and number connects and the number of minutes that you spent on a phone in a day—number of hours, actually, [was what was important]. And then maybe as Gen Z [and Millennials ] came in, …we started to see phone work be far less effective, and so we started measuring other kinds of connects beyond just phone time, and it ended up we stopped monitoring phone time at all.” Younger workers didn’t want to talk on the phone or answer long emails – it was all about texting. Then with COVID, the pendulum swung back to people answering their phones again.

Now AI has come on the scene as a potential substitute for human interaction, but Mark says his industry has seen that people prefer actual human interaction these days. “There are such big question marks about AI in every industry, ours included. I firmly believe that the people who invest in relationships now are going to be the people who ride the wave of AI the most successfully.”

The Hire Education office is 100% virtual, but relationships remain a central focus, especially in maintaining the company culture. “We have a [mandatory 15-minute] daily call with every member on the team and no work talk is allowed. …We don’t talk about politics a lot, but we talk about music, we have a lot of young parents on our team and so we talk about what their kids are doing, and [we] talk about television, and we’re making a daily deposit in the account of team relationship [and] team dynamic.”

Authenticity and adaptability in online relationship building

Mark says that as a business owner, he probably fields about 10 cold outreaches every day. He finds it fascinating to see the different approaches people take. “Some attempts at relationship are really clumsy and others feel really authentic. As a business owner, the ones that appeal the most to me are the ones that feel the least urgent, which is interesting. When I was trained initially as a salesperson we wanted to convey a sense of scarcity and a sense of urgency, and I don’t know that that works anymore and I don’t think I practice that way anymore.” Building authentic relationships in a purely online setting requires some new skills.

Want to learn more? Listen to the full episode for an exclusive peek into the future of edtech.

If you are curious about Hire Education and their services or just want to spend some time with Mark, visit hireedu.com/mark. He’s always happy to chat, meet new people, and develop new relationships.