Ask why a customer keeps coming back to a salesperson and you’ll usually hear the same answers. The product is great, the price is right, the sales pitch is good, or the marketing is everywhere.
Those things DO matter (and yes, the Cutco product genuinely is that good).
But if you actually look at why the same customers come back five, ten, twenty years later—buying for themselves, for friends and family, or for their employees—the product isn’t the sole reason.
It’s the person on the other end of the phone.
Rob Robincheck has been selling Cutco since 1997. He’s the number one rep in the company five years running. He’s won five silver cups, and roughly 70 to 80% of his business comes from companies that order from him year after year, building out custom collections for their teams.
None of that happens because Rob has a better pitch than everyone else. It happens because his customers like him, trust him, and want him in their lives.
We sat down with Rob to talk about how he built that kind of business and what salespeople sometimes get wrong about repeat customers.
➡️ Watch the complete interview here, and keep reading for five tips on building relationships in sales.
1. Great salespeople stay in touch *before* they need something
Most salespeople have one rhythm: reach out when there’s something to sell. A new product launches, a quota looms, a customer goes quiet—and that’s when the phone rings. The customer can feel it. The call is about the salesperson’s needs, dressed up as a check-in.
Rob does the opposite by staying in regular contact with his customers when nothing is on the line. He isn’t calling to ask for an order. He’s calling to ask how their family is doing, how their business is going, whether the last set of knives held up. The contact comes first and the orders come later.
His customers notice.
One of the most concrete ways Rob builds this in is something he calls his Annual Business Review, or ABR. Once a year, he sits down with each of his major business gifting clients to walk through what they’ve done together, what worked, and what next year could look like. It’s not a sales meeting; it’s a planning meeting. By the time the actual order conversation happens, he’s already mapped out the strategy with them.
Rob isn’t a vendor his customers buy from when the budget allows. He’s a strategic partner helping them solve a recurring problem: How do we show our employees we appreciate them, year after year, in a way that actually lands?
For Rob, it’s an ongoing conversation.
Transactional salespeople disappear after the sale, but relationship-builders deepen it. And the customer who feels remembered between purchases is the one who keeps coming back.
2. Trust is built through consistency (not charisma)
There’s a story sales reps tell themselves about the people at the top of the leaderboard. They must have magic words or a natural charisma the rest of us weren’t born with. If you could just figure out what they were saying, you could say it too.
One of Rob’s own colleagues admits he used to think about Rob exactly this way.
The reality is less mystical and a lot more practical. Rob isn’t winning because of a phrase nobody else knows. He’s winning because he does the unglamorous parts of the job better than almost anyone else. He follows up. He returns calls, shows up prepared, and remembers what a customer said six months ago and acts on it.
That’s the “trick.”
None of that requires charisma. It requires a system—as well as the discipline to run it whether you feel like it or not. Rob’s ABRs, his build-a-set programs, and regular check-ins aren’t bursts of inspiration. They’re a repeatable process that lets him deliver the same level of service in year ten that he delivered in year one.
Charisma might open a door, but consistency is what keeps customers walking back through it.
3. The best salespeople think long-term
The average salesperson is working a single deal. The elite salesperson isn’t thinking about one transaction; they’re thinking in decades.
That difference shapes every interaction. When you’re chasing one sale, you’re focused on what you can get from this conversation right now. When you’re thinking in years, you’re focused on what this customer’s life and business will look like five years from now, and how you can serve them along the way.
Rob’s business runs on the long view. The majority of his work is business gifting—companies that bring him in to build out their employee appreciation strategy over time. He works with each client on what he calls a “build-a-set” program: instead of ordering one big gift, they pick a new piece every year, layering onto a collection for their employees.
You can see how this plays out with his client Mrs. Yoders:
- In 2022, they gifted “club mates.”
- In 2023, “party starters.”
- In 2024, the shears.
- In 2025, the new veggie knife.
Each year, employees get something new and useful, with their anniversary and name engraved on it. By the time someone has been there a decade, they own a full custom collection—and associate every piece of it with the people they work for.
Helping companies execute this strategic generosity makes Rob feel less like a salesperson and more like a consultant. He isn’t showing up with a catalog asking what they want this year. He’s showing up with data on what they’ve done, ideas for what’s missing, and a perspective on what their team will respond to.
One strong, long-term business gifting client can be worth dozens of one-off sales. A company that orders for 50 to 70 employees a year, every year for ten years, becomes one of the most valuable relationships a salesperson can have. And Rob has a lot of those—because he built each one as a long-term partnership from day one.
4. Relationships create referrals and reputation
Every relationship Rob builds doesn’t just stay between him and one customer. It compounds.
When you do right by one business owner, they tell another business owner. The trust you earn with one person becomes a kind of currency. A single relationship turns into ten, and over time, a whole community of people already trust you before you’ve met them.
Rob describes it as a snowball.
In Rob’s case, that compounding has turned him into a name people know on sight.
You can see this play out at his trade shows. His colleagues describe what it looks like when he’s working an event—even on a slow day, there’s a line of people waiting to talk to him.
That kind of reputation comes from years of doing what he said he’d do, genuinely caring for his customers, and letting others spread the word. Every referral is a return on a relationship he invested in years earlier.
5. Customers want to feel appreciated, not processed
Zoom out from sales for a moment, because this point applies to almost any interaction between people.
Nobody wants to feel like a number. Not your employees or customers, definitely not your friends. People stay loyal when they feel seen and that’s exactly how Rob’s customers describe him. He’s someone who cares and pays attention:
Rob as a salesman is very kind. He’s very enthusiastic and he knows his product. He’s always happy to see you. He’s always gracious when he greets you and he knows and remembers your name.
This is also why his business gifting work resonates the way it does. The companies Rob works with aren’t trying to hand out a generic gift card and call it appreciation. Rob’s clients want their employees to know they actually matter inside the company.
A Cutco knife with the employee’s name and anniversary engraved on it does something a gift card can’t: It lasts, it gets used, and sits in their kitchen for thirty years. Every time they pick it up, they remember they were recognized.
The product is part of why this works. But the real reason for Rob’s repeat customers is that they trust him to get the human part right. To remember the anniversary, plan the program, or follow through on the engraving. They trust him to treat their team the way they would. One client shared:
He sees what we’re trying to accomplish here and he knows that we are more just in a company with employees. We are more like family than we are employees here at Mrs. Yoders.
Relationships are at the heart of sales—and life
Rob puts it more simply than anyone else could:
The knives are just a vehicle; it’s really the relationship that matters.
That principle doesn’t only apply to sales. It applies to leadership, account management, hiring, fundraising, teaching, running a business of any kind.
Long after people have forgotten the specifics of a transaction, they’ll remember how you made them feel.
