Eight tips for moving away from a deal-oriented sales mindset

With quotas to hit and profits to make, it can be easy for a sales team to focus on an "immediate deal" mentality when it comes to consumer relations. While this mentality makes for quick sales and easy wins, it can leave customers with a bad taste in their mouths.

Building strong relationships with consumers fosters customer loyalty and allows them to share their satisfaction with other potential consumers. So to help your sales staff transition from a transactional mindset to one focused on building relationships with consumers, eight members of the Young Entrepreneur Council share their top tips below.

1. Use data

Data is everything. We show the team how little time it takes to make the additional discovery and connection and resulting sales transactions. When we invest more time on the front end, we weed out unsuitable customers, have fewer returns, and have higher value sales. Showing that closing time is similar to bigger results helps our team. - Marjorie Adams, Fourlane

2. Focus on the big picture

Your sales team doesn't need to focus on the next sale; they have to focus on the next 10. Is the customer service top notch? Do you upsell? Are you building a somewhat personal relationship? The answers to these questions and more will help you overcome the "deal now" mentality and more to build relationships. - Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

3. Edit your incentive structure

If your sales strategy is based on quotas, your sales staff will now focus on transactions. By encouraging relationship building and brand loyalty, and moving on to finding solutions to close sales, you remove the burden of time. SEO services and digital marketing solutions sales are a long-term business, and our incentive structure reflects that. - Matthew Capala, alphametic

4. Encourage some customer statistics

Encourage repeat customer metric as well as new acquired customer metric. We tend to divide our customers into our sales team and review sales by customer quarterly. When repeat sales are low, we follow up by asking how many times the team member contacted the customer. This encourages repeat sales and indirectly forces them to build a relationship. - Kripa Shroff