Business Growth, Customer Relationships and Profit: How do you Build Valuable Relationships?

My experience of working with small businesses is that sales growth relies on relationship building. This is a skill that you need to employ continuously, with all your business contacts.

Prospects

You are surrounded by prospective customers who do not know you nor do they know what benefits you offer. When you approach cold contacts, the statistics suggest that you get a 1% to 3% response rate whether you use direct mail, telephoning or door knocking.

Warmer contacts develop after you have met a new prospect several times or when a client gives you a direct referral. As you meet the warm contact to build your relationship, listen for what they need, explore their interests, and ask about their purchasing habits.

When you know what they want and you have educated them in what they want to choose, these prospects develop into hot contacts, who are ready to trust you and to buy from you.

Customers

If you have a delivery cycle, you can continue to build your relationships through keeping your customers informed how the delivery process is progressing. No one likes surprises, so if the delivery slips or you find that there are quality issues, help your customers to plan around the delivery issues and they will appreciate the care you invest in communicating with them.

After you complete the sale, continue to track your customers' needs by maintaining sufficient contact that you can respond ?just in time?. People value this extra service especially if your competitors think that customers place volume orders in response to cut prices.

When you make a sale well, a customer can often refer you to three new customers so you can draw a good profit from creating long term relationships with customers.

Clients

Generally it costs 30% less to sell a second and third time to a current customer than it does to convert a prospects into a new customer. Where customers buy from you several times, you can gain useful market intelligence if you ask them what they value about your services and products. Feedback from these repeat customers will point to the benefits that give you a competitive edge.

Where your long term relationship enables you to fit into your client?s purchasing habits, you can relieve stress in their business and ease their life: this makes them keen to work with you again and again. Although deep client relationships take time to build, they create a barrier that can exclude competitors from entering your market.

Supporters

Some regular customers will support you by recommending you to their colleagues. These recommendations can take prospects directly to the stage of being customers with very little of your effort.

So keep these supporters informed about your plans and developments, and introduce them to people who matter in your world. Where you can encourage them to feel involved in the success of your company, they will repay your relationship in growing profits.

Nothing beats doing a good job and if you continue to deliver an excellent service over a long period, your customers will continue support your business growth. So the fastest route to business growth is to take a long term view on growing your relationships.

Adrian Pepper coaches people through business and personal difficulties, helping companies figure out what to do, how to move forward and what to get organised. You can contact him through Help4You Ltd, through his website at http://www.help4you.ltd.uk or by phone +44-7773-380133. At http://feeds.feedburner.com/help4you, you can listen to his podcast for small businesses.