Building effective working relationships with your team, partners, and clients plays a key role in future business success. While strategies of creating a productive environment with your colleagues are straightforward and clear, it might be complicated to replicate the same success with your long-term partners and customers, both new and existing ones. In this article, we will share proven strategies and metrics that will help you to build up business relationships and measure their success.
Why Building Relationships Is Important for Business?
Any relations, whether they are personal or business ones, require continuous maintenance and support. Additionally, such relationships should be mutually beneficial for both parties. Having a strong network of partners and clients will give your company a competitive advantage and will make it easier to do your business in the constantly changing and highly competitive market environment. Let’s first figure out how to build trust in business relationships with your key partners.
How to Build Professional Relationships?
Building professional relationships might seem complicated at first sight. However, if you are in good relations with top-rate experts across and beyond your main industry, you are likely to achieve desired goals faster with their help. So how to build strong business relationships? These are only a few of the techniques you can use to expand your partnership network.
- Diversify your network. Don’t focus only on people that are close to your major specialization and industry. Step outside of your immediate circle and look for new opportunities from unrelated markets and business areas (e.g. media, public organizations, etc.).
- Offer as much as you want to get. As we’ve mentioned before, sustainable relationships are built on mutual benefits that both parties get. Offer your partners help, connect them with other industry players they might be interested in, share valuable insights and grow together. You’ll see how people get more thankful and are willing to provide you the same support when you need it.
- Invest in relationships. There are people who make a big difference for your company and your main goal is to build trust with them. Spend some time with your key strategic partners to develop and maintain effective working relationships or get more personal by sending emails or small presents for holidays. You’ll see how these small but valuable steps can change everything.
- Always look for new opportunities. Even if you already have a strong partnership network it doesn’t mean you have to stop looking for new contacts. It’s important to continuously renew and expand your relationships that can add value to your business.
- Meet in person. Emails and calls are one of the key tools to use when reaching out to your partners. However, it’s always great to meet them in person, whether it’s a business meeting, informal lunch, or a conference you both are interested in.
Establishing Effective Working Relationships with Customers
When it comes to building better business relationships with your clients, the important thing is to find a universal approach that can be implemented to your key audience. You should know who your clients are, their key challenges and needs, and what solutions you can offer to cover them all. Let’s find out what else you can do to make your customer relationships stronger than ever.
- Hear out your customers’ opinions. If you want your products and solutions to fully meet your customers’ needs, ask them for feedback and hear it out. It will allow you to adjust your services, as well as marketing strategies to make them more efficient and result-oriented.
- Provide additional value. Share expert opinions, valuable insights, and other useful information with your customers. Create articles for your blog and social media account, let your clients subscribe to your newsletter to keep them constantly updated. These actions will help keep your audience more involved with your business.
- Keep the information up-to-date. Provide only relevant information and keep your customers posted on the latest news and updates.
- Appreciate your customer’s choice. Be thankful to your customer for choosing your products and services. Send them promo codes and special offers or provide additional support with the main services for free.
- Use a more personalized approach. Make your clients feel more connected with your company. It helps to build trust, thus allowing your audience to turn for more services and repurchase products, as well as to market your company to their friends and family.
How to Measure Your Relationship Success?
The most important metrics to look at when evaluating your relationships with clients include a great number of indicators, from financial KPIs and the number of partners/clients to lead generation and conversion rates. The good news is that you don’t have to measure all of these metrics by yourself. CRM platforms such as Salesforce or MS Dynamics help you to keep track of your KPIs and adjust your strategies accordingly. If you’ve implemented your CRM properly, all of the above-mentioned data will be available to you 24/7. Keep the track of these and other metrics in the platform to see if your business relationships are working the right way.
Final Thoughts
If you want to stay in touch with your partners and clients to establish a good working relationship, consider implementing CRM tools for your business. OMI offers a great variety of CRM services to let your company benefit from the latest business solutions and stay on top of the competition. If you are looking for a professional service to choose, implement, and customize any CRM platform in accordance with your needs, contact experts at OMI right away. We’ll be happy to assist you with any questions.