relationships

?When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.? ? Dale Carnegie.

When you close a deal, what?s your next step? When you sign the contract, shake the hand and file the paperwork ? what comes next? Is there a next? Or simply a next customer?

Businesses talk a lot about ROI, or return on investment. They look at the man hours, financial costs, ad spend and more to get a customer to make the purchase. Every sale has to justify the outlay. But what about the customer??What about?their ROI from?you?

A sale isn?t just about closing the deal. A sale isn?t just about dipping your pen into the inkwell again before the previous signature has dried. A sale isn?t one-way traffic of the customer into your sales lair. At least, it shouldn?t be.

Imagine you?re Joe Average. You work 60 hours a week to make ends meet. You do your time, pay your bills, feed your family and keep a roof over their heads. Everything you buy has to be fine tailored to fit the budget. You see something you want and you put aside money diligently every week to buy it.

You go to the store, or car showroom, or furniture showroom. You talk shop with the sales guy, and he?s nice. Interested in you. Wants to help you make your choice. So you do. You pay the price, say thanks and go home and wait for your new purchase to be delivered. A week later it arrives, then that?s it. End of story.

Now, imagine it a little differently.?Imagine it as a relationship.

The Relationship Behind the Sale

You go to the store, or car showroom, or furniture showroom. You talk shop with the sales guy, and he?s nice. Interested in you. Wants to help you make your choice. So you do. You pay the price, say thanks and go home and wait for your new purchase to be delivered. Within 24 hours, the sales guy calls and confirms your delivery time. A week later it arrives.

A couple of days after delivery, your sales guy calls again and asks how your new purchase is. Not customer service. Not the after-sales team, but the sales guy who sold you your new toy. He wants to make sure you?re happy and that to call if you have any issues at all. You say you will, then hang up the phone with the biggest smile on your face. Now?that?s service!

Sales guys don?t have time to follow up, they?re too busy selling? No-one offers?that kind of service? This example is unrealistic? They do, and it?s not.

Sales is Service is PR is Service is Marketing

People are emotional beings. We live by how we feel; act on how we?re acted upon; respond to how we?re treated. All our decisions are based around our emotions and how we experience a moment.

Think of any business transaction you?ve had as a customer. The best ones will remain in your mind for all the right reasons, and chances are you?ve made repeat purchases with these vendors because of your user experience. The bad ones? They remain with you too; but your business with the vendor doesn?t.

So the next time you make a sale or win a new client, try this checklist if you?re not already using any of them:

• Add the details to a database and set alerts for relevant promotions. Not just every promotion you have, but ones that are?relevant to your new customer.

• If you received personal details like date of birth, send a birthday gift or card.

• Set up calendar reminders for regular check-ins. Nothing so frequent to annoy, but regular enough to care.

• If there?s a business near your new customer they can benefit from that ties into your sale, refer them. It shows you really have their best interests at heart, not to mention builds a great business relationship with the other business.

Sales are important ? every single business needs sales to survive. But quick buck sales only last so long; they?re simply bush fires that will run their course. Relationship sales that?genuinely caress our emotions, though??That?s the money right there.

How many relationships are you building?

image: dann_z

There’s a lot of talk about relationships in business, and how to make business more human.

There’s also a lot of talk about how businesses need to be more like friends, and treat people the way you would your friends if you want to succeed.

Add in the view that businesses and their clients should be friends as well, and you could be forgiven for thinking you need to be either Ross or Rachel and sipping coffee in Central Perk to get anything done.

But here’s the thing – that viewpoint is a myth. Not only that, it can also be a dangerous myth.

Here’s why.

Friends Don’t Always Come With Benefits

Let’s look at the friends angle first. Can you have friends in business, or be friends with clients? For sure – you can be friends with anyone. But here’s why you shouldn’t be.

With friends, we let our guard down. If they’re going through a tough time, we support them. If they need to borrow money, we help, and let them pay it back when they can. If they need to pick our brains, we’re there for them.

But because we let our guard down, we very often don’t put it back up.

Transfer that to business, where either a client, or a supplier, or a customer, uses your service but doesn’t pay when they’re meant to. Or a supplier skims money off you left, right and centre without you knowing it. Or they talk with your competitors behind your back while you’re working on getting them airtime.

Business don’t have friendships. Businesses do what’s right for them at that given time, and rightly so – it’s why it’s called business and not high school.

If you’re friends with a business, you can put your own success and longevity at risk because you don’t want to ask too much of your friends. Unpaid invoices go unchallenged, and soon your business is struggling to pay an invoice. Once you start down that path…

Relationships Never End Well or They Wouldn’t End

The relationship angle is an interesting one, because obviously we can (and should) foster relationships in our business lives at every turn.

Relationships are the key to a long client/vendor arrangement over a one-hit-never-work-together-again one. Relationships are also the key to promoting relevant skilled resources to those that need them – say, you recommend one client to another, or an outsourcer to a client, etc.

But the key to remember is that, just like many personal examples, relationships come to an end. Girlfriends split with boyfriends, friends split with each other, families grow apart. The closer the relationship, often the harder the split is. It can turn nasty as sides are picked and grievances aired, and that’s no fun at all.

We’re currently working with a client whose previous agency always talked of their “special relationship”. Yet once the agency’s work and results were questioned, the owner went postal and demanded more money (even though they’d already skimmed the client of more than $12,000 for a project in limbo). So much for the “special relationship”.

So is it impossible to combine friendship and business relationships? No – if approached right.

Buddy Boundaries

In an ideal world, we’d all be friends together – people, businesses, ex-lovers, enemies, etc. The world would be an easier place for all if we lived on clouds and blew bubbles at each other.

But we know that life isn’t ideal.

Instead, we just need to realize that sometimes, it’s okay to not be friends. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friendly, though – similar word but a world of difference.

• Respect boundaries. Appreciate that while tone and interaction can be friendly, at the end of the day you’re still in business to both make your clients and customers successful, and be successful too.

• Maintain professionalism. I’ve seen some classic emails because of a “friendship” – because of the perception, professionalism goes out the window from the sender. Keep in mind that businesses are professional ventures, and don’t send a CEO an email better suited to pub talk.

• Understand subtleties. While we look out for our friends unreservedly, often we can’t offer the same support to our clients, vendors, customers. Know where the cut-off point is and you know where the help can begin and end.

We all want to be friends. We all want to have the most amazing relationships. And, often, that can be the case (or a close resemblance to it).

But we also want to be successful – for our clients, our customers, ourselves and our families who depend on us to keep a roof over their head. If we confuse friendship and relationships with friendliness and professional relationships in that order, we run the danger of losing sight of crucial decisions that need to be made.

And none of us can afford to do that.

image: marie-II