“My business depends on building relationships.” Have you ever heard someone describe their business that way? I hear it nearly every day.
What’s most interesting, to me anyway, is that most of those who say it, don’t really believe it. It’s true. Virtually no one would argue the fact that it’s important to build a rapport and a relationship with their customers or clients. After all, people do business with people that they like, right?
But the reason I argue that most people don’t really believe it is because of the way they approach marketing. Typically, a prospective client will come to us and say, “I want to run a telephone campaign (or direct mail or email, etc.) so I can get appointments with prospective customers in my area.”
When asked what sort of follow-up plan they have in place for those they don’t actually meet with or for those that they don’t actually sell at the appointment there is usually dead air and a blank stare. These clients of ours have no intention of “building a relationship” at all. They think, wrongly, that building a relationship means collecting a check at the end of the sales presentation.
But it is much more than that. If you are in a “relationship building” business, then you need a marketing plan that focuses on building a relationship. Does that mean you can’t use different media to sell to prospects right out of the gate with? Of course not, but that shouldn’t be the only, or even primary, goal of your plan.
Your marketing plan should consist of a way to systematically and consistently communicate relevant, timely, and useful (i.e. valuable) information to your prospects and your customers. That is the way you build relationships. Not by selling them every time you see them…not by wasting their time with useless information…and certainly not by contacting them one time and then dropping them from your database.
So, how do you go about building a relationship with your prospects? We’ll get into some specific examples of how to do just that in our next post…so stay tuned!
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