Once you’ve established your Win-Win Plan, you come to a step in the Win-Win Negotiation process that is often ignored: the development of Win-Win personal relationships. Developing these relationships is critical because people are very willing to go that extra mile for someone they like and trust. On the other hand, people will rarely stick their neck out for someone they don’t like or don’t trust. What you’re trying to develop is the mutual assurance that if you do a favor for someone today, you can rest assured that when you ask that same person for a favor sometime in the future, the answer is going to be yes.
The way you develop these relationships is by spending some time visiting the people you deal with prior to asking them for anything. This allows you to get to know them and them to get to know you. You can use opportunities like lunch, informal visits, golf, and so on to allow this to happen. Use this time to demonstrate that you are an honest and trustworthy individual. This step is critical, because without trust you’ll never get genuine commitment from the people you’re dealing with.
Eighty to 90 percent of the people who go into the business of selling insurance leave the field within a year. Let’s take a look at a typical beginning insurance salesperson: Jill, a college graduate who has just completed an insurance company’s three-week training program at corporate headquarters.
After Jill has completed her training program, the first person to whom she tries to sell a policy is her father—someone with whom she has an already-established relationship. Now he probably needs another insurance policy like he needs a hole in his head, but he wants Jill to get off to a good start. After the transaction has been completed and Jill has a check from her father, he says, “I’ll bet your brother could use some insurance.” Of course her brother, in the interest of maintaining peace in the family, will eventually say yes. And finally, everybody like Jill has a few friends who would rather write her a check for a few hundred dollars than risk losing her as a friend.
Eventually, however, Jill runs out of friends and relatives—people with whom she has already-existing relationships. When this happens, she tries the same techniques on total strangers that worked on her father and she experiences doors slamming in her face. Regardless of how strong a person’s self-image is, there are a finite number of door slams that a person can endure. When this occurs, Jill decides that maybe she isn’t cut out to sell insurance and changes careers.
It’s interesting to contrast the Jills of this world with those people who go into the business of selling insurance, make a career out of it, get rich at it, and eventually turn the business over to their children. The only thing these people do differently is to invest, up front, in relationships and then spend the time and effort to maintain these relationships. After a certain amount of time, they no longer have to sell insurance. The reason: Their satisfied customers are selling it for them!
In his book, Thriving on Chaos, Tom Peters talks about how a Lutheran minister in a small town in Pennsylvania used relationship development to solidify his parish and increase church attendance. When this minister first took over his parish, he shocked the local people by practicing Ministry by Wandering Around, by being the first minister in twenty years to visit the local coffee shop and have coffee with the farmers. As the minister put it, “By stopping at the coffee shop, I build relationships.” This minister also visits each of his parishioners’ homes once a year because he has found that people speak more freely on their home turf. As a result of these activities, attendance at Sunday services quickly shot up by 25 percent.
