One of the best ways to develop a successful and sustainable business, is to develop deep, rewarding relationships with your customers or clients.
A very common complaint people have, is that vendors often work hard to encourage them to become customers, but then become less interested in talking to them, once they have ‘converted’ them. This approach is myopic. It fails the customer and fails the vendor. It leaves the customer feeling unappreciated and leaves the vendor missing opportunities to strengthen her relationship with her customer. It’s also totally unnecessary!
The temptation to distance ourselves
With so many pulls on our time, it’s easier and faster to email someone when we have a message for them or we need some information from them. However, if we’re not careful, we can substitute too many of the human elements of our business for ‘efficient‘ alternatives. We can become a regular name in their inbox, whilst being a rare voice on their phone line.
So here’s a thought: What if you were to decide that from time to time, one of those emails would be replaced with a phone call or face to face conversation? What if you factored some conversation time into your working week, even if it’s just a catch-up call? (Especially if it’s just a catch-up call!)
Time is money
Yes, time is money, but investing your time building relationships with your clients is a sound investment.There will be days where you are just too busy to make one of these calls, but on the days where you can factor in 20 minutes of your time, in my experience, it’s a very good investment.
Here’s why:
- It may simply make your clients feel more valued and less inclined to change providers, when your competitors target them with a great offer.
- It could also allow you to identify ways to be of greater service to them, increasing your value to them and their value to you.
- It might even be the encouragement they need, to feel confident enough about the way you look after customers, to refer you to their friends.
In most cases, you will enjoy ALL of the above when you embrace the human side of your business.
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Photo: Mark Heybo
Like you say before Jim, marketing is all about people.
Badly written letters and emails from providers, who are obviously using mailmerge software, pretending to give a damn is my pet hate. This means they KNOW they should be doing the personal touch, but don’t care enough.
Thanks for another post that needed writing.
Hi Jean Paul. Glad you found the post useful. We’re all in ‘the people business’ and when we lose track of that, we miss opportunities.
Jim,
Great point.
Thanks for connecting on LinkedIn.
We must talk soon
Mark.
Nice points there Jim, I agree about small businesses needing to add the personal touch in their online marketing activies. There are so many ways that businesses can do this now from Email Marketing to SMS Marketing plus videos and pictures just to name a few!
That’s not really the human approach I wrote about here, Richard. Those tools are fine for sending mass messages, but nothing can replace talking to another person, especially when dealing with your clients.
Mr. Connolly,
Did you mean in your post that it’s good to develop human, personal relationchips wth your clients? I always thought that any personal friendships only makes business more complicated. Your opinion is different from what I used to think.
Don’t you think building a personal relationships with your partners is risky at some point?
Hi Polina. No, I was talking here about having a more human approach to business. There’s a huge difference between keeping in contact with clients, and trying to make them your friends.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hi Jim,
Great article, connecting with clients personally is a great way to show you care about their business. One other way to show you care about your costumers would be a personalized gift at christmas or after closing a deal to show appreciation.
This site gave me a lot of ideas regarding costumer business relations.
http://www.unitwin.com/websitepublisher/blogs/the-best-corporate-gifts-to-give-your-customers-to-deepen-relationships-with-them.html