“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

How Many Relationships Are You Building? originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

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

The Great Friends and Relationships Myth originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

We get easily distracted by shiny new things.

We see something that gives us the “Oooh” ripple of excitement, and we buy into the premise. For a while, everything is good. We see only positives, and ignore the (in hindsight) questionable.

But then the cracks appear.

Faults that had always been present start to become clearer. Actions and non-actions reveal a side that we had previously ignored, but now can’t be ignored any longer.

We start to ask the questions of the shiny new thing that should have been asked from the start.

The reactions of the questioned tell us a lot about what our own next steps are.

Do we continue the relationships? Do we accept the faults? Do we look at workarounds? Do we bite the bullet and wait for things to improve?

Or do we cut the ties and accept it was good while it lasted, but some things just weren’t meant to be?

Questions and decisions are an everyday part of our lives, personally and professionally. Some are easy to answer; others, not so much.

How we decide defines how we move forward. Decide right, and we continue to grow. Decide wrong, and we often never recover.

Are you making the right decisions for you?

image: Oberazzi

Enchanted Disillusionment originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

Fight for our clients. Fight for our beliefs. Fight for our ideas to be heard and understood why we’re presenting them.

Fight for our value and worth.

Choosing when to fight, though, isn’t easy. Even though there are times when we know we are so right, no matter what we say it’s going to be viewed as wrong.

It takes a lot to walk away at times like these.

You put in a lot of work. Man hours, development hours, project hours. But that’s the work stuff – you expect that. There’s also the personal hours away from those you love.

But you do it, because you’re doing it to make a better life for those you love. That’s why you fight.

Pride comes into it too. You can see why those that are fighting with you are having qualms, but you also have the solutions to those qualms. Or at least you would, if they would let you.

But they don’t.

So now you have to decide, do you fight or do you surrender?

Surrender isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It smooths the water and allows you and your combatant’s ships to sail more easily in the same waters again. And everyone loves plain sailing.

But every sailor knows the next big storm is only one grey cloud away.

So now you’re back to fighting. But how long do you allow a fight to go on before realizing it’s only creating lasting damage? How long before you’re punch-drunk and unable to fight any more? And not just with this opponent, but every single one from now on?

Anyone can fight. Some can fight better than others, and for longer.

The question is, are the victories sweet or bittersweet? Are they even victories at all?

photo credit: Profound Whatever

Picking Your Fights originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

• Being a good listener.
• Using easy-to-understand terminology.
• Caring about their patient’s concerns.
• Being non-judgmental.
• Respectful of their patient’s time.

These traits are second nature to good doctors. Maybe more business owners should go to medical school.

Bedside Manners originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

However, solid PR folks like David Mullen suggest it should be People Relations, as does online marketer and social media guy Ari Herzog in a post from earlier this year. Often it’s called Press Relations or Print Relations. I had a little look at the topic last year and there are plenty more views out there.

But you know what?

Who really cares? Let’s take the emphasis off the P, and concentrate on what’s left – the R, or relations, because this is surely the one constant out of all the PR acronyms. For, without relations (and the conversations that spring from these relations), is there any point left to any of the P, whether it’s public, press, people or similar?

S. Neil Vineberg, President of Vineberg Communications, offers his take in a series of excellent little video snippets. What’s yours?

Never Mind the P, Just Get the Relations Part Right originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.

My 12for12k project is all about bringing the global community together for one overreaching goal. Heck, my blog tagline is “Community; Connection; Conversation”.

So, yes, community is a big thing for me.

Why? Why do I concentrate on community, as opposed to other “magical” words like ROI, returns, end percentages, profit margins and endless other affiliations to the normal business world? After all, for many it’s just a fad; another part of the social media hype.

Simple. Community is everything. Community is you. Here’s why.

This past week, the mother of all storms (for where I live, anyway) hit, and hit with a vengeance. Our patio was a pool, our front porch was just as bad, and our basement was flooding like Niagara Falls. But you know what stood out about the whole experience? Community.

On Twitter, people I haven’t met (yet) had heard about the storm and reached out to check in on my welfare. Both Dave Folkens and Shannon Boudjema tweeted and asked if I was alright. Never met either of them physically, but they heard one of their community members was having issues and reached out.

Then there’s my neighbours. I’ve spoken with them a few times since we moved in, but it’s been more pleasant conversation than anything else. But, as soon as the storm hit and my wife went to them to ask for emergency numbers for our property management team, they were right over. Heck, my next door neighbour Chris forgave his beer mood and jumped over the fence in just his shorts to help me pump the flood water out from my water well.

That’s community. That’s sharing experiences. That’s being there for no other reason than someone needs help.

Now. Imagine you’re a business owner. Or a blogger. Or simply someone that needs help to make something happen. Imagine how a community you’ve built around you (or you’re part of) can help you share something you need to expose to a wider audience.

Imagine a blogger evangelizing about you because you’ve made a connection and there’s trust there. Imagine a customer buying your stuff because you communicate with them. Imagine a shareholder sticking with you as opposed to jumping ship, because they’re part of your dream.

That’s community. That’s building something. That’s change right there.

Still think community is just a dirty word for the latest social media fad?

photo credit: striatic

Why It’s All About Community originally appeared on Danny Brown | Social Media Marketing Blog - The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing under a Creative Commons license.