Building relationships with clients and prospects can take years, but it’s well worth the investment.
Building relationships with clients and prospects can take years, but it’s well worth the investment. By fostering these relationships, projects will continue to come in the door. It does take a plan, time, and focus to be successful, though. People do business with people they like and trust, so building these relationships with your ideal client is imperative to the growth of your company. Most clients and prospects want to do business with a firm that is continually improving and growing. Your clients and prospects want to work with someone that is the expert and has a pleasant demeanor.
It’s hard to keep up with relationships but anything worth doing should be done right. Usually anything that is worth doing takes time and dedication and relationship building is no different. Over the course of the next couple of blogs, I’m going to give you some specific instructions on how to foster these relationships. You’ll get detailed information throughout the next three blogs on new business relationships, existing business relationships, and past business relationships.
To peak your interest in the mean time, here are some ideas for you to foster relationships in your professional life:
- Call them and ask them how they are doing and how you can help them.
- Send them a handwritten card (this could include a newspaper clipping about them or their business).
- Take them to coffee or lunch.
- Send them a birthday card (if you know their birthday).
- Ask about their family or a hobby.
- Ask them about a challenge they are facing professionally and find a solution.
- Invite them to an event.
Become friends with your clients. Your best clients usually become your friends, and long after you’ve done business, you still see one another. This is when you know you’ve reached the ultimate business goals. Mimic those relationships. Write down the characteristics of your favorite or ideal clients and then go find more clients with those same characteristics.
Great Project + Genuine Relationships + Clients = Long Lasting Friendships
Completing a great project while nurturing the relationship with your client results in friendship. A genuine relationship based on honesty and trust is being able to have those tough conversations, setting clear expectations, and consistently communicating with the other person. Go out and make friends. Build relationships. That’s what business, and quite frankly life, is all about. Enrich those you work with through being a friend and support system. Building relationships takes time and effort, but the results are happiness and life fulfilling, emotionally and financially. Now pick up the phone and call someone you haven’t talked to in a while.
Read Part 2 here.
