Tried and Tested Ways to Build Brilliant B2B Customer Relationships
Building business-to-business customer relationships are notoriously difficult, mainly because it isn’t as easy as sending your customers a discount coupon once in a while. Your customers probably don’t review your social media or comment on your posts. You can’t be as sass-forward as Wendys when your customers expect a certain amount of professionalism from you.
So how can you go about building customer relationships in the most elegant way possible?
Know who you’re talking to
Your first impression is your last impression.
An incredibly common expression that doesn’t always stand true in the world of business. That being said, your first impression, although not definitive, does still hold a lot of weight.
Your customer begins forming an opinion about you from the very first time your company interacts with them. A good way to make a lasting first impression is by doing a thorough amount of background research the moment the customer enters your pipeline.
Knowing things about the customer’s vision, past successes and achievements will give you a solid arsenal of tidbits to casually slip into conversations and get the relationship started on the right foot
If the customer is a company that you have already worked with, go through the CRM before approaching them. Make a note of their preferred method of communication and implement strategies that have previously shown to have worked with respect to that particular customer and apply that information in further communication.
Communicate Constantly
In good times, and bad, communication with your customers is key
After your first meeting, whether you made a good first impression or not, take the initiative to send them a follow-up email. Summarize what was discussed in the meeting, and perhaps attach a link to that thing you had in common or mentioned you would send them.
Be polite, brief, and consider these emails as building blocks for a stronger customer relationship.
While the project is ongoing, communicate small product-related successes. If an extremely complex bit of code successfully integrates after weeks of failure, let the customer know. A lot of existing B2B communication revolves only around failure, but more on that later.
After closing the deal, send a concluding email thanking them for working with you. Mention all the ways your company could help them out in the future, a prospective roadmap outline of sorts.
Keep in touch even after that. Invite them to company events, send congratulatory emails when their company succeeds, maybe send them an e-card for Christmas.
Other than the standard automated emails, send emails that make it evident that a human is tailoring them for a specific person. Like when the CXO’s favourite football team wins the championship.
If you don’t have the resources to provide constant client support, look for other means to be available in case existing or potential clients ever have a query. For example —
Integrate a chatbot
The most popular way to go about this is by integrating a chatbot onto your company website.
More and more companies are jumping on to the chatbot train, including tech giants like Facebook
This increase in the popularity of chatbots for the B2B space is because these companies are beginning to realise the many ways chatbots add value to their organization.
Chatbots can accelerate the B2B sales and marketing process because they have great potential to be multipurpose entities. They can directly collect any information you need from a client at the same time that the client is registering a query, they can schedule meetings, they can even be integrated with your calendar apps to reflect these scheduled meetings.
Chatbots open up a new channel of communication with your clients, and this can be very beneficial when you’re trying to build a B2B customer relationship.
If you’re someone that’s looking for a chatbot to integrate with your website, be it B2B or B2C, I’d recommend BotCart.
Make success-based memories
Keeping on the topic of having an open channel of communication between customer and company, after creating an outline of the project plan, most B2B companies only communicate when something goes wrong.
Frantic phone calls, constant apologies, long meetings to discuss and formulate a path to fix whatever errors have occurred. Logically speaking, this need-to-know approach does make the most sense when it comes to optimizing time and resources.
What this approach ignores, however, is that when it comes to your customers, the only memories they have with your company revolve around problems and missed deadlines, something inherently negative.
When there is a moment of shared success between your company and your customer, take a moment to celebrate it
It doesn’t have to be a full-blown party. Find ways to form memories with positive associations.
Don’t forget to be human
One of the biggest problems in the corporate world today is that companies are primarily data-driven, and with the sheer amount of data available, who can blame them, really?
While all that data will yield strong analytical results when it comes to profits and product, it won’t help you understand the people.
Studies show that even if your customer is happy with your product, the chances of them coming back to you for services decrease significantly if they’re unhappy with your customer service.
Make your company more than a faceless organization
Encourage your service team to take ownership of any communication with your customers. Be human when communicating with humans.
A simple way to go about this is by moulding relationships with the people in your customer companies whom you worked with.
From keeping an open channel of communication while you work together, to sending out an automated albeit personalised email to them on their anniversaries or birthdays after the project has concluded, there are so many ways to go about this.
Remind them that they have not been forgotten and discarded the moment the payment came through.
Note. Everything. Down.
Like any relationship, a customer relationship will have its highs and lows.
While conducting any communication with your customers, make a note of their preferences. Do they prefer phone calls over emails? In what tone do they like to be spoken to? Did they appreciate the gift you sent them on your project milestone? What are their favourite restaurants? What’s their preferred drink?
These notes will not only help you in short-term communication but will also help you in the future if you ever want to approach this customer again
If the manager that was handling this customer leaves your company, these notes will also aid the new employee in charge of maintaining the relationship with that customer.
At Adalin Labs, we’re a team of nerds enthusiastic about helping other people succeed, and we hope to do that every day by sharing our knowledge here, on Medium. We post an article every week across domains like entrepreneurship, marketing, design, technology and more.
