A Great Business Relationship Starts With A Great Question
We’ve all been to the cocktail party or the networking event where we get bombarded by the person who wants to talk about themselves the entire time. Worse is the person who asks you the sort of questions that they use for screening potential customers. To them you are just another notch in the belt so to speak. You know as well as I do that this is not the way to start a business relationship. Great relationships start with great questions. This is true in life and in business. When you meet someone for the first time the goal is to learn as much about them as you possibly
Enjoy Smooth Sailing With Your Clients By Following One Simple Tip
Effective managers know that, to get the best out of your employees, you need to set the right expectations right up front. Doing this not only ensures that your team will be successful, it also helps you to build a strong relationship with your team also. The same advice also works to ensure that you client relationships go smoothly as well. When your business is newer and you haven’t established rules and parameters for how you work with clients, it’s easy to create some bad habits in your relationships with your customers. These bad habits can be due to any of the following: You don’t anticipate the rules that need
Treat People Like People
Working in a service business can feel like an amazingly thankless endeavor. A client relationship can be tough when the relationship feels like a one way street with one side always giving and the other always demanding more. Have you ever felt that way about a client relationship? Sometimes we get so caught up in results and our day-to-day that we forget to treat people like people. Don’t get me wrong I love working with people to solve problems in their business. It’s what I do best. However, there are certain instances or relationships that give me pause at times. I had a former client who used to treat me
Unlike My Women…I Do Like My Projects Fast and Easy
Fast and easy projects? Oh you like those too? Not all projects are going to be as fast and easy as we would like. One asset that I have utilized to help our business get projects completed on time is people. More specifically, people that we know and trust. When it comes to people you know and trust, you don’t even have to specifically know them. If I have a partner that I know and trust that recommends someone to me, then that is good enough. I mentioned recently what happened to my consulting firm, The Business Blueprint, when we weren’t ready for the growth we had experienced. We broke
Getting In Touch With God, Self and Business
A cool thing happened to me a couple of months ago, I welcomed my fourth daughter into the world. (My wife did most of the work but you probably already knew that.) Another cool thing is that my wife and I made a bet that if it was another daughter then I could buy a gaming system like Xbox, PS3, Wii etc. So I went ahead and picked up a PS3. As a gamer I really only like playing sports games. Madden, College Football, NHL Live etc. If EA sports puts it out, I probably like it. All this sounds great right? Except that I usually don’t play it when
Smart Business Owners Know How To Use Relationship Capital
When you are starting out, you can spend all the money in the world on a fancy, optimized site, the latest marketing techniques and create the finest product ever created and find out that none of it matters. Without relationships, you’ve got nothing. Smart business owners know how to use and manage their relationship capital. Smart business owners know that without a team to implement their ideas, their ideas are meaningless. If they don’t have the right circle of influencers to help them spread the word about their product or service then no one know about it. Think about the relationships that you have had in your life, what was
Endorsements Can Provide Quick Credibility But Be Careful
Ahh endorsements. It feels as if sometimes we sell our soul or, at the very least, sell-out to get them. Endorsements can be a quick and easy tool to help you build credibility provided that you handle them correctly. On one end, getting an endorsement from a New York Times best-selling author can be pretty cool. On the other end, too many fake endorsements can just make you look, well, fake. So how do you get good endorsements? In the book industry, you will notice many up and coming authors who put out a book and get a lot of powerful testimonials from people who have already written a well
Build Business Relationships By Asking The Right Questions
There are obvious reasons why people don’t buy a product or service. Price, time, trust, etc. There are also a whole set of other reasons that people don’t buy our product/service that never come up in normal transactions. So how do we uncover these hidden reasons? Yesterday I shared 6 questions that you should ask people who are giving you testimonials. The first question to me is the most important. What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying this product? Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear about the things that people loved but those answers are always more obvious. When people share with you the
The Underrated Marketing Tool
Business owners spend a lot of time worrying about bringing in new business and rightfully so. As we sit and worry about these customers we haven’t met, we often forget about the customers we already have. Introducing customer service, the most underrated and underutilized marketing and sales tool that a business owner has at his/her disposal. In the 1950s, Peter Drucker said that “there is no business without customers”. It seems as if we forget that in this day and age. We have all heard stories of good customer service, good and bad. The big question that so many have is, “why can’t businesses get customer service right?” This
Jobs For Life…Insane or Brilliant?
Every once in a while I see an article that sounds so crazy I have to read it immediately. The recent article by Steve Tobak from BNET, Jobs for Life: If It Works in Germany, Why Not America? The article is about how the German company Siemens gave 128,000 of their German workers jobs for life. In the article Tobak wondered if this was insane on the surface. I am wondering the same thing. I can’t tell if this is a brilliant move or disastrous. Essentially, it comes down to two competing theories with regards to offering ultimate job security. The people for a move like this would argue that rewarding
