February 18th, 2008
My Mantra for Building Business Relationships: Treat Partners/ Vendors/ Suppliers Like Customers
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Quick Summary: Read my mantra for building business relationships — treat partners/ vendors/ suppliers like customers.
Last week, I wrote about Anita Campbell’s compilation of best kept marketing secrets featuring tips from some of the world’s top marketers, small business experts and bloggers.
Toby Bloomberg is compiling another great list of tips (via Rajesh) from marketers and bloggers around the world by asking them —
How do you build great business relationships with people? Do “clients” and “partners/ vendors/ suppliers” have different points of view about what is important for each?
Toby’s compilation post on building business relationships has a wealth of good advice and I would strongly encourage you to read through it.
Here’s my own mantra for building business relationships — treat partners/ vendors/ suppliers like customers.
All of us know how to build great business relationships with customers. All of us know that we should –
- Treat our customers as people, not checkbooks.
- Treat our business relationships as courtships and build permission over the long term.
- Understand our customers’ needs and align our goals with our customers’ goals.
- Gain our customers’ trust by communicating in an open and transparent manner.
- Manage our customers’ expectations by making realistic promises and delivering on them.
- Delight our customers by delivering more value than they expect, or are paying for.
All of us intuitively understand these mantras for building great business relationships with customers, even though we may not follow them all the time.
However, most of us don’t intuitively understand that our partners/ vendors/ suppliers are our customers too.
That’s because most of think of business relationships as transactions —
I need to build relationships with my customers because they pay me. My partners/ vendors/ suppliers need to build relationships with me because I pay them.
We don’t really exchange relationships for money in a business relationship, we exchange contacts and know-how.
Partners/ vendors/ suppliers can be a great source of both contacts and know-how. While we pay our partners/ vendors/ suppliers for know-how, money itself would rarely motivate them to go beyond the call of duty and give us more than 100%. If we treat our partners/ vendors/ suppliers like we treat our customers, the benefits will be disproportional.
Also, in an age of frequent career shifts and layers of business interconnectedness, who knows when a partner/ vendor/ supplier becomes a customer?
Feeling pain develop great relationships . In this reference Business relationships, if a client believes he can count on you in his problems he will not even think of somebody else
(These views comes from a perception of a 6 months old entrepreneur , That`s me , so it may differ from concept of customers of big companies, That`s why i used word client here )
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Thanks for continuing the conversation. Your response is priceless and one aspect of the relationship that is too often taken for granted.
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