Nurturing Relationships to Grow Your Business

Whether you are developing relationships and network with others online or offline, it’s still an incredibly effective way to grow your clientele and partner with companies who will be able to help you down the road. Steadily growing and nurturing those relationships help build that trust and confidence people will need in order to put their money into you or your products/services. You would think it’s an intuitive routine that most people would automatically do, but unfortunately, there are many business owners out there who think they can take the passive route and limit human interaction as much as possible, yet become successful. I’m not saying that you won’t become successful if you don’t work on your relationships, but you’re at a severe disadvantage if it’s not a primary focus in your growing your business.

Below are a few observations I’ve seen with successful relationship building:

• Your Customers. As observed in a previous article, many SEO firms I’ve seen take the approach of shoving a bunch of visitors to a client’s website and hope they all make a purchase or fill out a contact form. The problem with that is there usually is no work on the website from the marketing consultant to make those visitors feel more comfortable and trusting to take the desired actions.What do the successful companies do? Take the example of Amazon.com. One of the biggest sign of trust throughout their website is the customer reviews. Prospect buyers on the fence about a particular product will likely heavily rely on those reviews in their purchasing decisions. Those reviews automatically develop that trusting relationship between buyer and seller.
• Partners. I’m not referring to business partners or investors in your company; I’m talking about the companies you meet at your local networking events or online networking groups. No matter which industry you’re in, it’s vital that you have at least a couple of partners you’ve developed deep relationships who will help pass you leads and vice versa.
• Employees. There was a statistic in an article somewhere that said something like, “Less than 40% of all employees are satisfied with their jobs”. That means in a 100 person company, 60 of them would bail ship if they could! That’s a staggering number if you look at the stats, but it’s not surprising if you’ve been at a job like that before.Keep the people under you happy and build and strengthen those relationship bonds. It’s not necessarily a huge paycheck that will keep them happy, but the passion, vision, culture and everything else that goes into keeping a company running. It’s one of the most overlooked factors for business owners and CEOs.