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Coursera

Relationship & Communication Mastery

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Overview

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Build the relationship management and communication skills needed to sustain long-term success in B2B sales. In this course, you’ll learn how to develop strong professional relationships with clients, maintain trust across multiple interactions, and communicate effectively throughout the sales lifecycle. You’ll explore techniques for managing ongoing client relationships, strengthening collaboration with stakeholders, and maintaining consistent communication that supports business goals. The course also focuses on persuasive written and verbal communication used in professional sales environments, including client emails, follow-ups, and relationship-building conversations. What makes this course unique is its emphasis on relationship excellence as a strategic sales capability. Rather than focusing only on winning deals, you’ll learn how to maintain long-term client partnerships, improve customer satisfaction, and support ongoing business growth. These skills help sales professionals build credibility, strengthen collaboration with clients, and maintain productive relationships that lead to repeat business and stronger partnerships.

Syllabus

  • Boost Emotional Awareness: Define Emotional Intelligence for Sales: The Four Components
    • This Module builds a shared, professional definition of Emotional Intelligence (EI) for sales and negotiation contexts. You will move from vague ideas (“be empathetic”) to a structured mental model grounded in four EI components: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. The Module focuses on recognition and language—so you can reliably name EI components accurately, identify what each looks like in a sales conversation, and avoid common EI misclassifications (e.g., friendliness, enthusiasm, or positivity). The Module also frames EI as a business skill that supports trust, psychological safety, and smoother negotiation effectiveness by helping sellers stay composed under pressure and buyers feel understood. By the end of the Module, you will be able to correctly name the four EI components, identify observable behaviors associated with each component in sales calls, and use professional, neutral language to describe emotional signals.
  • Boost Emotional Awareness: Observe and Interpret Emotional Intelligence in Live Sales Interactions
    • This Module will help you to move from knowing what Emotional Intelligence is to using it as an observational and adaptive skill in real sales conversations. In professional negotiation settings, EI is not demonstrated by what a seller feels, but by what they notice and how they respond. This Module trains you to slow down your interpretation, identify emotional cues from both the buyer and themselves, and design responses that regulate tension, increase psychological safety, and strengthen relationship momentum. You will practice reading tone shifts, hesitation, enthusiasm, defensiveness, and disengagement as meaningful data rather than background noise. You will learn that emotional cues are not “soft impressions” but operational inputs that guide negotiation behavior. By the end of this Module, you will be able to observe emotional dynamics in a role-play scenario, document emotional cues clearly, and propose adaptive responses that show emotional intelligence in action. This module establishes EI as a performance skill: something that can be practiced, evaluated, and improved through observation and reflection.
  • Control Emotions in Deals: Regulate Emotions Under Price Pressure
    • In this module, you will learn how to manage your emotional responses during high-pressure pricing conversations by using simple self-regulation techniques such as pausing and controlled breathing. You will practice staying calm, maintaining focus, and confidently redirecting discussions toward value and return on investment.
  • Control Emotions in Deals: Turning Emotional Signals into Insight
    • In this module, you will learn how to observe, identify, and analyze emotional cues in sales conversations by reviewing recorded deal interactions. You will practice tagging visible signals such as body language and facial expressions and reflect on how effectively you adapted your responses to guide more productive outcomes.
  • Unearth Needs Fast: Surface What’s Not Said
    • This module teaches you to practice a repeatable listening loop to uncover unstated executive needs during a short discovery call and translate those insights into CRM-ready language.
  • Unearth Needs Fast: Proving You Listened
    • This module teaches you to analyze discovery calls using transcripts and listening metrics. By identifying paraphrases, clarifying questions, and talk-to-listen ratios, learners turn listening into a measurable, defensible skill that improves discovery accuracy and coaching outcomes.
  • Write Persuasive Emails: Persuasive Objection-Handling Emails: Social Proof + Scarcity
    • In this module, you will build a practical foundation for writing persuasive objection-handling emails in B2B sales contexts. Rather than treating persuasion as a set of tricks or templates, you will focus on decision-making: which proof points to surface, how to introduce urgency without pressure, and how to structure an email that acknowledges resistance while guiding the reader toward a response. You will examine how Cialdini’s “social proof” and “scarcity” principles appear in real sales communication, and how these elements are often explored, drafted, or iterated within AI-enabled sales environments. While AI can accelerate idea generation and variation, you will learn that your judgment is essential for ensuring relevance, credibility, and ethical use. By the end of the module, you will produce a complete 400-word objection-handling email that becomes the foundation for experimentation in the next module.
  • Write Persuasive Emails: Measure What Works: A/B Test and Calculate Reply-Rate Lift
    • In this module, you will move from persuasive writing to validation by testing whether your message performs better than a control version. You will design a lightweight A/B test across a small prospect set, calculate reply rates, and compute lift to evaluate impact. You will see how AI-enabled sales teams accelerate learning by quickly surfacing performance patterns, while remaining responsible for interpreting results and deciding what to scale or refine. By the end of this module, you will be able to calculate lift and communicate insights clearly to support data-informed negotiation decisions.
  • Spark Instant Rapport: Create Instant Rapport Using the FORM Method
    • You will apply the FORM method to structure first-call openings, build early trust, and capture observable rapport indicators in CRM for consistent relationship tracking.
  • Spark Instant Rapport: Analyze Rapport Effectiveness Using Buyer Warmth Signals
    • You will evaluate post-call data to identify how different opening approaches influence buyer warmth and extract actionable insights to refine rapport-building strategies.
  • Tailor Your Message: Diagnose the Buyer and Tailor the Message
    • In this module, learners practice identifying DISC communication signals from a buyer conversation and applying that insight to craft a targeted follow-up email. The focus is on translating buyer behavior into practical messaging decisions that increase clarity, relevance, and engagement. A critical component is understanding the importance of asking relevant questions with any clarifying follow-up questions, and honing listening skills to learn to diagnose DISC personalities
  • Tailor Your Message: Evaluate and Improve Message Alignment
    • In this module, learners move from message delivery to evaluation and improvement. They practice interpreting buyer feedback, applying a rubric to score clarity and relevance, and deciding how to revise follow-up messages to improve alignment and outcomes over time.
  • Generative AI for Sales Communication 
    • In this module, you will explore how generative AI can enhance your sales communication by helping you draft messages faster, adapt tone for different buyers, and improve overall effectiveness. You will learn where AI adds the most value, how to write better prompts to guide AI outputs, and how to combine AI assistance with your own judgment to create clear, relevant, and persuasive communication. Through guided practice and hands-on activities, you will evaluate AI-generated content, refine it for real-world use, and develop the skills to use AI as a communication co-pilot—without losing authenticity or control. By the end of this module, you will be able to use generative AI confidently to support your day-to-day sales interactions.
  • Project: Building Client Relationships: Communication Strategy and Stakeholder Engagement
    • In this project, you will develop a structured communication and relationship strategy for a B2B sales opportunity involving multiple stakeholders. You will analyze communication styles, identify emotional and behavioral cues, and adapt your approach to improve engagement and trust. You will assess stakeholder preferences, prepare responses for high-pressure interactions, and design tailored communication approaches. You will also create written and conversational communication aligned with stakeholder needs and plan structured discovery interactions. In addition, you will evaluate communication effectiveness using measurable indicators such as talk-to-listen ratio and analyze outreach performance using A/B comparisons and reply-rate lift. You will compare predicted outcomes with actual results and refine communication or targeting approaches based on performance. You will also assess post-pilot performance using metrics such as ROI, leads, revenue, and customer acquisition cost (CAC), and identify whether adjustments or pivots are needed to improve outcomes. This project reflects real-world situations where effective communication and relationship management influence deal progress. It focuses on adapting communication, building rapport, managing interactions across stakeholders, and using data-driven insights to continuously improve communication effectiveness and business results.

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