How to Build and Maintain Quality Business Relationships

Relationships in business are just like relationships elsewhere in life: messy and sometimes chaotic, but generally good to foster. This goes for relationships with customers, vendors, and even your employees. Today, we want to look at how you can build better and stronger relationships for your business.

Relationships Help You Build a Better Business

Collaboration is crucial to seeing success in any line of business—as collaboration is a relationship in its own way. If you invest in the appropriate relationships, your business can thrive. Here are the three key relationships that every business should make time to nurture:

The Employee Relationship

Without your employees, your business would be nothing; this is a truth that all business owners need to own up to.

Therefore, your employees should feel like they are valued and supported as both people and professionals. While today’s world gives businesses unprecedented control over employee monitoring and productivity, your organization should stand out as one that treats its employees with respect and invests in their potential. Your team should look forward to coming to work and see it as a place where they belong—because if they don’t, they’ll keep looking until they find a workplace that does.

Take an active role in nurturing your employee relationships and it will pay dividends down the line.

The Vendor Relationship

You hire your vendors to fulfill a certain need for your business, but this doesn’t mean that they are any less human or important than your in-house staff.

It pays to nurture an ongoing relationship with your vendors, as you never know when you might call on them in a pinch. You want vendors who will be responsive and happy to help, not those who will groan every time a support ticket or phone call comes in. It takes two to forge this type of collaborative relationship, though, so make sure you’re treating your vendors well so they can in turn treat you well.

Who knows? A well-maintained vendor relationship could yield unforeseen or unexpected benefits later on in the form of loyalty discounts or other perks.

The Customer Relationship

Who can forget about the customers, whose expenses fuel your profits? Again, they are much more than money printers, and you’d do well to remember it.

Long-term relationships with your customers can be challenging, though, as depending on the nature of your product or service, it might be tricky to build a rapport. Customers in particular are loyal to their wallets, and they will look to get the best deal they can. However, it’s good to remember that not all benefits have a price value attached to them, and you can find ways to keep your customers coming back for more with the right strategies and technologies in place.

In particular, you can use business analytics, customer relationship management software, and artificial intelligence to determine what makes a customer buy, then double down on what you know works.

How to Build Strong Relationships

Generally speaking, you can expect any relationship to grow over time if you focus on making the other party feel valued. You can do so with these two tips:

• Express appreciation: Whether you’re working with an employee, a vendor, or a customer, it’s good to let the other party know how much you appreciate them. Benefits range from increasing employee morale and productivity to encouraging your customers to renew a subscription or purchase a new product.
• Don’t over-promise: It’s better to overdeliver than to overpromise. If you oversell your abilities, then you’ll end up with disappointed customers due to delays or mistakes, which will further hamper your own reputation over time.

Technology plays a key role in building and maintaining any business relationships. To get started today with the right tools for the job, call iTSTL at (314)828-1234.