Buying Experience from my Summer Internship

Over this past summer I had an internship with a medical equipment sales company. My role at the company was not on the sales side but it was on the supply chain side so I was able to be in a lot of supplier meetings in which the supplier would try to sell their products to us. Over these meetings that I was able to sit in a noticed a few valuable things. The first thing that I noticed in regards to sales is the value of building relationships with the people that you are selling with.  The suppliers that we worked with were very intentional with asking good questions to better understand the needs that we had as a company. For example, they found out that it was important to us to have our logo on some of our products. This then led the sales people to figure out how the could change the manufacturing process of the items so that we could get our logo on them. I really appreciated the fact that the sales people were willing to do what they could to met our needs. Another aspect of their sales tactics was not only get to know the company itself but the people that they were selling to. They would ask questions about the lives of the people that they were selling to. They even wanted to get to know me as the intern who had no buying power. As I spent the summer with this company I got to see many interactions between the suppliers and my company so I was able to see the relationships continue to grow and flourish. These types of intentional questions ended up getting the business from my company. Overall from this experience that I had over the summer I learned how important it is to be intentional and relational when it comes to sales.