If you want to build strong relationships with your clients and increase your sales, you must understand transactional and relational marketing and the difference between the two. The two strategies are common in marketing, and although different, they have the same objective; enhancing your business performance.
Transactional Relationship For Sales
The strategy focuses on short-term sales boosts and point of sales (POS) transactions. It concentrates on maximizing sales efficiency by increasing individual sales. As a result, the transactional relationship has no interest in creating and nurturing a long-term relationship with the customer. In its simplest terms it’s about high volume sales with no investment in client relationship building.
A transactional relationship is based on four marketing elements:
- PRODUCT: Involves creating a product that meets the clients’ needs and expectations.
- PRICE: Involves assigning appropriate and attractive prices to attract customers.
- PLACE: Involves placing the product where buyers can easily find it, relieving them from the stress of searching for it.
- PROMOTION: This includes convincing customers to buy the product immediately.
Relational Sales
Relational selling is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating customer loyalty and nurturing long-term customer engagement. This strategy aims to build a solid and long-term connection between the customer and the brand or the product. Relational selling aims to achieve the business’s long-term success instead of a short-term sales boost.
Read More: Is It Time For A Corporate Rebrand?
The Differences Between A Transactional Relationship and Relational Selling
- Transactional relationship relies on a single sale formula of increasing sales through mass marketing and product promotion. Relational selling is more inclined towards customer loyalty by providing ideal products and services. The strategy aims at improving the way you perform your business periodically to improve the value of your customer relationship.
- Transactional marketing focuses more on short-term benefits through price and profit maximization. On the other hand, relational selling is all about developing strong and long-lasting relations with customers, partners, and businesses that influence your organization directly or indirectly.
- There’s minimal customer interaction in a transactional relationship, whereas relational selling maintains frequent interactions.
- While transactional relationship focuses on increasing efficiency and overall quantity of individual sales, relational selling aims at building long-term relationships with customers.
- Transactional marketing emphasizes the point of sale transactions, whereas relational selling is all about providing helpful information to customers in order to develop strong ties.
- While transactional marketing focuses on getting the order, relational selling aims at becoming the sole supplier or preferred marketer in the industry.
- Transactional marketing results in a short-term relationship between the buyer and the seller. On the other hand, relational selling creates a long-lasting and robust relationship between the seller and the clients.
- There’s low customer commitment in transactional marketing, whereas relational selling is characterized by high customer commitment.
- In the end, a transactional relationship evaluates results, while relational selling evaluates how the customers feel about the results.
When choosing between transactional and relational marketing strategies, you should consider the pros and cons of each.
Transactional marketing is cheaper and has little emotional attachment, making it suitable for inventory clearance. It allows you to clear discounted products and create room for more in-demand products.
Relational selling is your best bet if you want to increase ROI since it focuses more on customer retention than achieving mass sales. By building genuine connections with your customers, relational selling earns you positive reviews. You can use these reviews to get an insight into what you’re doing and where you need to improve to offer better services to your customers.
If you want to prevail in relational marketing, consider taking customer feedback seriously and acting on it. When your customers feel that you take them seriously, they will trust your services and want to continue doing business with you.
Read More: Internet Marketing And The Importance of Trust
Whether to use transactional marketing or relational selling depends on your company’s goals. Transactional marketing is your best strategy if you wish to have products flying off your shelves. But if you hope to create a customer-oriented business with long-term plans for making sales, relational selling is the way to go.
Andy Bush is President of Bush Marketing. Contact him today at 416-214-4298 or andy@bushmarketing.ca for a discussion about how Bush Marketing can help your website do more for your business.
Bush Marketing | Web Design Company Toronto | SEO Company Toronto | Call Today!
