Why high-end business management and especially sales are comparable to a doctor-patient relationship?
Relationships in life are very important, but they are also an extremely complex construct. Those who successfully build and maintain relationships in life generally have more success than those who struggle with the same. Being able to build more successful and good relationships creates a differentiating parameter that leads to success in one case and to failure in another. Relationships are certainly not short-term, nor are they a one-sided affair. Compare a relationship in business to your marriage or life partnership; it’s never about satisfying only one side.
It’s always about sharing and a “dance around a middle ground” and ultimately seeing a compromise that has grown organically. Initially, in a kind of “getting-to-know-you phase”, it’s usually about finding out, what’s important to the other person and how you can contribute positively to their happiness or enrichment. In sales it’s very important not to prioritize your own aspirations first but to enter a true business-partnering process. This diagnostic procedure involves finding out where the other person’s points of interest exist and how you can contribute to offering them added value.
After situation assessment and complex diagnosis, I can offer advice and assistance to the other side, like how a patient is treated, with the best possible suggestion by a medical doctor, for instance. Personal diagnosis opens possibilities and allows to differentiate and narrow things down with my own service and product offerings. It is never a superficial, general descriptive process. Relationship building has always to be adapted to the specific situation. Solutions, whether in business or medicine, must always be patient- or customer-centered. Each individual situation is fundamentally different. Therefore, in business, it’s also important to operate with tailored service offerings for the customer. This, in turn, is only possible if, in a diagnostic process, the situation and the motivations of the other party have been thoroughly understood and coordinated.
A patient wouldn’t go to a doctor where the doctor immediately decides, “Yes, we’ll start therapy right away!,” without diagnosing the patient. Here, too, the principle of diagnostic approach and the fundamental desire to assess the situation and needs of the other party applies.
Sales is not the primary focus in a business relationship, but could definitely be a part of this relationship later on. To put it in medical terms, sales is never the cause, but rather the symptom. Successful relationship management is the cause from which the symptom of successful selling can emerge. Only if I don’t want to sell but first assess the situation and let the other partner speak and report on their situation, can tailored solutions lead to success in sales if they are aligned with the customer’s world and needs.
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