It’s sometimes easy for sales professionals to take their client relationships for granted, and vice versa!  Even when you already have a good working client relationship in place, you can’t help wanting to take it to the next level, and that means earning more of the business your clients are giving you. Here’s a good question to get the ball rolling:

“If you could enhance one thing about our business relationship, what would it be?”

As a manager, are you at risk of losing some of your most valuable employees? With the ongoing economic recovery and more jobs being created, could your employees be asking themselves — is it time to move on?

According to a recent survey by the Conference Board, only 45 percent of American employees are engaged in their work, the lowest satifaction level recorded in more than 22 years. The poor economy can be partly blamed — making it difficult for many employees to find interesting and rewarding jobs. The Conference Board further points out that employee engagement levels have been on the decline for more than two decades.

Don’t let your dissatisfied employees leave. Schedule a time to have that “big picture” conversation on how they can become more engaged in 2010 and beyond. Start the discussion with, I value you as an employee — I’m as committed to your success as you are. Then follow up with the following questions:

Have you ever called on a potential sales prospect who is complacent about his business problems?… Is your customer in survival mode?… Is your sales prospect hoping the problems will straighten themselves out on their own? Perhaps your prospect is just plain clueless about the problems he is facing?

Your customer wants to fix his problems, but because he can get caught up in his day-to-day struggles, it is hard to step back and assess the situation. That’s where you step in. It’s time to do some tweaking to your sales prospecting techniques — helping your customer organize his thoughts, assess the situation, and start addressing his business problems — by asking the following two questions:

As a sales professional are you ready to meet customer expectations for the future? Kiplinger Washington Editors released their latest published report about future customer needs in relation to new jobs — the outlook looks promising.

According to the December 18 The Kiplinger Letter, over 60% of businesses say it’s difficult to find qualified workers, despite a loss of about 8 million jobs. And that’s because many skills are in short supply (machinists, programmers, engineers, scientists, healthcare workers, pharmacists, network specialists, etc.)