The most powerful word in sales is "Help". It can cause customers and potential customers to rally around you. It can change the interaction between you and the most difficult customer in the worst of situations.

Here are two ways to use the word effectively and one way to use the same word and ruin a relationship. (You'll want to be careful with this one!)

Changing Relationships

"Relationship selling is a redundant term - all selling is relationship selling."  Chuckism #13

How would you react to someone who said, "I need help," or, better, "I could use your help"?

Whenever two people come together for the purpose of doing business, a preconceived notion exists for each person before the encounter. The salesperson can see the potential customer as a challenge or even an enemy to overcome and won. The customer may anticipate that the salesperson is going to be a bully, pushing hard for their own agenda.

The "Help" phrase above changes the relationship. Using the phrase, of course, must be genuine, sincere and backed up with action.

Asking for help psychologically places us in a subservient position, not a dominant one. Conversely, it places the customer in a perceived position of superiority. This typically puts the customer at ease and makes them less defensive.

As the CSO of your organization, you have learned that going to a subordinate and beginning the conversation with "I need your help" eases whatever tensions there may have been. They see you as less of a superior and more as a person needing help. The conversation changes because you have leveled out the other person's perception of a hierarchy.

When you need someone's help - and we all do from time to time - the relationship changes, especially when we are brave enough to ask for help.

Changing Conversations

Focus your agenda on helping the customer and watch what it does to the relationship.

As you plan your call, keep asking yourself two questions:

• How does this question/statement help me help the customer?
• What else could I do to help them?

Too many times we formulate questions and statements that are designed to lead the customer to buy from us. There is nothing wrong with that. However, when we focus and phrase those words around what they will do to help the customer, the relationship changes.

Presenting ourselves to the customers as a resource for help changes the way we think about ourselves and will then change our choice of words, intonation in the voice, body language and other subliminal aspects of sales.

We cannot control the customer's attitude about us before we meet but we can drastically affect that attitude using the word help.

Let's say you are meeting the customer for the first time. You could go in with both guns blazing, telling the customer how great your products and services are and, at the same time, asking them superficial questions about them or their business. This is the scenario many customers expect.

Or you could go in asking for help.

Just make sure that the help you are asking for is not something the customer thinks you should have done for your self. This is how this concept is misused most often. Instead, develop a "Help" question that digs deep and addresses a genuine need of yours.

Which of these two "Help" questions is more effective:

• "Mr. Customer, can you help me understand the buying process here?"
• "Mr. Customer, can you help me understand the superiority of your rotary gear technology versus the belt-drive approach most of your competitors use?"

The first question clearly focuses on how we can get what we want. The second question focuses on something that is important to the customer - their differentiation. The second question also requires pre-call planning, something that customers generally appreciate.

How NOT to use "Help"

Never, never ask a question with both "Help" and "Why" in it. "Why" questions do not work. When we are asked a why question, our natural inclination is to defend the issue. Without going into the details, this is a conditioned function of the mind - we tend to defend whatever is addressed in a questions that contains the word "why".

When we first begin using the word "Help" in sales, there is a tendency to use the phrase, "help me understand why". It will hurt you, not help you. Hard-charging salespeople have used this erroneously: "Can you help me understand why you do not want to begin saving money today?" You sense the insincerity in this one, right? Ever wondered why? It's the combination of "help" and "why" - it's a toxic mixture.

In the example above, the question about the rotary gear could have been, "Can you help me understand why your company uses rotary gears instead of belt-drives?" That question might have been okay although the customer might have felt defensive needing to justify a decision they have made.

But think it through, the primary reason that the customer uses one technology or process over another is because they think it's better.