One of the challenges facing religious people in businesses today is how to conduct their business and stay true to their faith. In Lumen, we teach Value Sales for our B2B customers. In the past few years, we’ve taught four businesses where people were religious and to our surprise, after we got to know each other and everybody felt free to speak what’s on their mind, we were asked to expand on the link between selling and faith.
After visiting more than 1000 businesses and implementing hundreds of Zoho CRM installations, we found that not many get trained in the methods of Value Sales. That is: listening (not just hearing), talking with humility, overcoming objections with empathy, commanding respect and instilling trust.
Values Sales is a method where the B2B or B2C sales cycle of a product or service focuses on the benefit to the customer and holds margin. Here, we found businesses do not like to admit their sales team requires training, and training in particular across the disciplines when it comes to faith – God:
More generic areas where we find training is also often required include:
The questions for us were:
At Lumen Business Solutions, we try to show how the faith and value selling can work together by enhancing:
Having effective listening skills means being able to display interest in the topic discussed and understand the information provided. In today’s society, the ability to communicate effectively is becoming increasingly important. While the ability to speak effectively is a highly sought-after skill, developing effective listening skills is often not regarded in the same respect.
Listening in the context of God encapsulates more than usual listening. It is a discipline of hearing your customer without distorting their questions or needs.
Effective listening ensure you respect your customers where they are in their buying cycle, and helps your customers to make the correct decision truthfully.
Effective listening enables you to know what not to say to your customers, and to know how to say things to your customers.
Humility is an attitude of spiritual modesty that comes from understanding our place in the larger order of things. It entails not taking our desires, successes, or failings too seriously.
How to Listen, Understand, Respond
Empathy allows people to build social connections with others. By understanding what people are thinking and feeling, people are able to respond appropriately. Empathy promotes helping behaviours – not only are you more likely to engage in helpful behaviours when you feel empathy for other people, but other people are also more likely to engage with you when they experience empathy.
We would like to introduce a new term: “Intellectual Empathy” where you demonstrate you really understand what your customers are asking.
Be worthy of being respected and uphold expectations. Some people just seem to command respect from the second they walk in the room. We often judge the people we engage with on how they look, not on how they perform. This is even more significant when you consider that other people form an impression of you within 7 seconds of meeting you and that is generally the impression they will take away with them.
Trust is fundamental to the human condition, as it serves as the foundation from which every relationship develops. Our ability to build and maintain trust is the basic requirement that enables our participation and contributions to teams, communities and other social structures that construct our lives.
We are now interested to find out if there are any other businesses looking for ways to harmonise between value selling and faith in God. If you are interested, please do not hesitate to contact us.
We work with businesses of all sizes to solves a wide range of problems. If you are wondering how we can help you use technology to help your business perform better, please get in touch with us.
17 Cockburn Street, Grey Lynn, Auckland 1021, New Zealand
