When sales stall, the usual fix is another promotion, but a customer easily won with a discount is just as easily lost. Relationship selling grows repeat business in a different way: customers come back because they have a connection with the brand. For a retail leader, the first decision is who owns that connection, one associate or the whole store team.
What is relationship selling in retail?
Relationship selling, sometimes called relational selling or relationship retailing, is the practice of building ongoing, personal relationships with customers so that repeat purchases come from recognition rather than promotion.
The customers a retailer already has are its most dependable place to grow. A retailer’s approach to relationship selling depends on who will engage with the customer, how outreach will happen between visits, and how store performance gets measured. Our whitepaper, Retention, Relationships, and ROI, lays out the market conditions behind the adoption of clienteling, the formalized approach to relationship selling for luxury, premium, and specialty retailers.
Four principles define relationship selling
In our work with retailers, the ones that sell best follow the same four principles, whether the customer is a top spender at a flagship or a regular at a neighborhood store.
- Memory: Every conversation picks up where the last one ended. Sizes, preferences, and past purchases are recorded, along with the life events that matter to the customer, like a move or a wedding.
- Proactivity: The customer is contacted between visits, and every message is guided by a relevant event, such as a restock in the customer’s size, or a check-in after a big purchase.
- Recognition: The customer feels known on every return visit and in every message received. That feeling is what brings the customer back.
- Trust: Trust is earned with reliability. Follow-ups happen when promised and recommendations fit the request.
None of the four depends on a commissioned sales team. They depend on how the retailer chooses to deliver them.
Clienteling makes relationship selling repeatable across stores
Clienteling formalizes relationship selling, and in practice, it runs two ways. The familiar picture is the star associate with a book of customers they can greet by name. Some retailers sell another way: customers are loyal to the brand and shop whichever store is closest. The customer engagement work is shared across a team, and each store’s performance is measured as a whole. The four principles stay the same in both. What changes is where the relationship lives: with a person or with the store.
Associate-based clienteling builds loyalty to a person
In associate-based clienteling, each associate builds and manages their own book of customers, often called a client book. The customer’s loyalty attaches to a person who knows their taste and reaches out when something is worth their attention. The model is common where advice drives the sale, in luxury, beauty, home, and higher-consideration apparel, and where associates carry individual goals.
The advantage of associate-based clienteling is depth. The exposure is that the relationship follows the person. When what an associate knows lives in a notebook or on a personal phone, it leaves the store when they do, and associates who aren’t natural relationship sellers have nothing to work from.
Team-based clienteling builds loyalty to the store
In the team-based model, the customer relationship belongs to the store. Outreach is a shared task any associate can pick up, and whoever is on the floor when a customer replies carries the conversation forward. The model fits retailers whose customers are loyal to the brand, whose teams share the floor, and whose performance is measured at the store level.
The advantage is consistency: the customer’s experience doesn’t depend on who is working that day. The relationship stays with the store when an associate leaves, moves to another location, or is off shift when the customer replies. The exposure is ownership. When outreach belongs to everyone, no one is accountable for sending it or for answering the reply.
Many retailers choose a hybrid approach to clienteling, with shared outreach for most customers and top associates keeping their own books. The model can also change as the program grows. A retailer can start team-based and give its most valuable customers a dedicated associate once the practice is established. Neither mode of clienteling is a lesser version. It all depends on how customers shop and how teams are measured.
Both associate-based and team-based models rely on one customer record to function. Clienteling platforms sit on top of the CRM, POS, and messaging tools a retailer already runs, and own that record while connecting data across systems.
Customers who hear from their store more often carry higher customer value
In the Tulip Clienteling Benchmark Report, customers who received 1-10 clienteling communications over six months had a 37% higher six-month customer value than customers who received none. For customers who received 11-20, the difference was 69%.
The decision in front of most retail leaders is how to run relationship selling: through associates, through store teams, or both, on a system that keeps every relationship with the business. Tulip Clienteling supports both associate-based and team-based clienteling models. Associates can manage their own books. Store teams can work from a unified inbox.
If clienteling is new to your team, our beginner’s guide to clienteling covers how the practice works and where to start.
