Your customer relationship is crucial to the success of your business. In the CSR / Sustainability business field the customer relationship is even more important than in most business fields.
Why? The most important service you can provide your client / customer is to help and educate them in CSR / Sustainability related topics. You have the knowledge and experience and they want you to show them what you can do to help. Your customer wants you as a person and not just your product or manpower.
Keep your business relationships as personal as possible
This is really the main message of today’s post. It is good to have a website, a blog, a Twitter account, or even a good selling book on Amazon. But if you want to sell your services or your product, your personal business relationships are most important.
We all have a lot of contacts, but how many of these contacts are so useful that you could try to convert this contact into a sale or at least into a “sales-lead” which you can be sure about? Maybe it would be worth checking your contacts database based on these criteria? I do this on a continuous basis each 6 months and it helps me enormously.
One tool I am using is Salesforce. Salesforce is a great tool to keep a separate contacts list with a proper history of the communication, contact details, documents, etc. It might sound as overkill to use such a potent CRM tool but if you are serious about converting potential sales into sales you need to make sure you do not lose track of your communications with your contacts.
My advice therefore is clear and simple. If you want to sell your service or product in the CSR / Sustainability field you need to keep your business relationships as personal as possible. Focus your efforts on making long lasting contacts which you can trust and they know that they can trust you. Obviously this process is ongoing and time consuming but by sticking to this objective you cannot go wrong. At least this is my experience.
Picture Credit: rachaelvoorhees on flickr
Cguthrie|October 21, 2011
Fabien, I increasingly find an interest by clients in maintaining that deeper, more meaningful relationship as they share the journey and experience of transition and change. There's plenty to risk if you don't get it right, and I expect that connection is tantamount to reassurance that we're still on the rails – so to speak.
Cathie Guthrie
FabianPattberg|October 24, 2011
I agree Cathie. The more meaningful the relationship the better the business in the long and short term. This is also my experience. Thanks for the comment.