These days, selling to customers is about building and sustaining relationships. You'll hear this process referred to as relationship selling. Relationship selling is about finding the right people to market to and building strong relationships with those people from the beginning. Good relationship sellers prioritize their connection with their customers over all other aspects of the sale. They develop trust by adding value and spending lots of time with prospective customers before they try to close a sale. When you're trying to decide whether to move forward with a prospect, you'll want to consider all the different factors.

There are typically six steps in the relationship selling process:

• Add value– To quickly gain credibility and establish yourself as a trusted advisor, you should add
  value to the prospect's life. For example, you might reach out with helpful suggestions, send
  links to relevant content, or make a valuable introduction.
• Learn about the prospect's situation– After you have the prospect's attention and have proven your value, dig into the prospect's business challenges, objectives, metrics, and qualifying characteristics, and also his or her personal and professional goals. This information will help you answer two critical questions: Can your product help the prospect? Does the prospect have the authority, budget, appropriate timeline, and so on, to buy your product?
• Provide personalized recommendations– Combine your new knowledge of the prospect with your subject matter expertise to deliver suggestions. Back up your recommendations with examples of customers who have been in similar situations.
• Resolve objections– A necessary part of any sales process involves surfacing and solving the prospect's blocking points. Give your prospects enough time to explain themselves, be patient, and, above all, answer them honestly. If a prospect has a genuine reason to be concerned, don't ignore it.
• Provide a win-win solution– Take the mentality that a win for your customers is a win for you. Together, you're trying to find the best possible outcome. Prepare several concessions that you're willing to make. By proactively offering compromises, you show your prospects that you're on their side and make them more likely to offer compromises of their own.
• Continue to provide value over time– Don't disappear from the prospect's life as soon as he or she signs the contract and becomes a customer. Otherwise, customers might assume that you're interested only in their checkbook, not in their success. Look for reasons to reach out every few months or quarters.

There are multiple ways that sales professionals can build long-term relationships, but two strategies are often at the forefront:

• Keep track of buyers and their needs. Learn what buyers are interested in by looking at the content that they share on LinkedIn and other social media channels, and also the discussions that they participate in. Get real-time alerts when they change jobs, connect with someone in your network, or are mentioned in the news.
• Discover and evaluate business opportunities with the company, and gain unique insights into company growth, functional trends, and recent news articles.

Engaging buyers through personalized content

Get intelligent suggestions for relevant content, and personalize content to the buyer. Package all the sales content into one organized view for buyers, and share it throughout the customer lifecycle. Set up notifications when new viewers interact with the content, and track their activities to gauge what buyers are interested in.

One way that Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help empower sales staff to build relationships is through Embedded Intelligence. Embedded Intelligence is a suite of features that continuously analyze the vast collection of data about customer interactions that's already stored in your Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Exchange databases. This analysis will help you better understand your business relationships, evaluate your activities in relation to previous successes, and choose the best path forward.

Embedded Intelligence includes the following features. All these features work together to combine their individual strengths.

• Relationship Assistant- This feature analyzes all the data at its disposal and generates a collection of action cards. Each action card includes a message that summarizes what the card is about and a set of links that can be used to take action. The Relationship Assistant sorts the action cards by priority and filters them for your current context.
• Email Engagement- This feature helps you create more effective email messages and learn how your contacts are interacting with them. As emails are sent to, opened by, and forwarded by customers, Email Engagement tracks those activities and reports back information. It can also remind sales staff about different actions that they should take if customers do and don't view the emails that are sent to them.
• Auto Capture- This feature looks for messages to or from relevant email addresses and shows sales staff those messages right inside Dynamics 365. Sales staff can then choose to track any of the suggested messages. Those tracked messages become available to other team members and can be used by other Embedded Intelligence features.

How Embedded Intelligence helps

When sales professionals sign in to Dynamics 365 at the start of their workday, the Relationship Assistant draws their attention to their most important items and tasks. These items and tasks come from all areas of the application and include activities, opportunities, and leads.

Here are some of the ways that the Relationship Assistant can help:

• It lists action cards in order of their priority. Cards are reordered as the sales professional’s day changes.
• It scans incoming emails and extracts words/sentences that match models that are set up in the system.
• It helps keep the sales professional on task throughout the day.

The following image above shows what sales professionals might see when they first sign in.

Action card carousel– The Relationship Assistant shows pending action cards here. The most important card appear on the left, and additional cards might be visible, depending on your screen resolution and the view that you’re using. As you work, and you dismiss or snooze cards, additional cards slide in from the right. The preceding image shows a top-level dashboard. Therefore, the cards are drawn from all areas of the site. Carousels are also available in views for individual records. In that case, the cards are filtered for your specific context.

Action cards– Each card represents a single task.