Robert Green of Melbourne Business Advisors On How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships

An Interview with Rachel Kline

Speaking of loyalty, the trust of a customer should never be betrayed. All the work you’ve put into cultivating a customer relationship will be gone the second that they think that trust has been broken, privacy stolen or sold, or hear negative news in the press about you or your business.

Building lasting customer relationships has many benefits, including increased revenue, positive word-of-mouth recommendations, and saving on acquisition costs. But how does one do this? In this interview series, we are talking to Product Managers, founders, and authors who can share their “Five Tips For Building Lasting Customer Relationships”. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Green.

Robert Green is the CEO of Melbourne Business Advisors, and author of The Simple P&L System™, where he works as a business advisor helping growth phase companies grow and prepare for a better exit. Robert also volunteers as a business mentor with Florida Tech’s WeVenture Ignite360 program helping women owned business leaders gain control of and grow their business.

Thank you for doing this with us! Before we begin, our readers would like to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path?

Robert’s first experience in business started when he was 12 years old and his dad, a 2nd generation grocery store owner, brought me a TRS-80 Color Computer with the request to build a pricing calculator to automatically calculate prices based on markup percentages. Remember, this was before spreadsheets and most of this was done on a handheld calculator or by pencil and paper. For over five years, Robert’s been volunteering at the Women’s Business Center at Florida Tech’s WeVenture Ignite360 program as a business mentor helping women owned business leaders take their business to the next level. Today, Robert is the chief business advisor and CEO of Melbourne Business Advisors, LLC, helping business owners with marketing and sales strategy, cost management, and strategic growth planning leading towards a better exit.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that has occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or takeaway you took from that story?

As a young officer candidate in the Florida Army National Guard, I was acting as a team leader role moving my team through a movement exercise across a wide area. One of the training officers stopped the exercise because it was a teachable moment because I had been acting like I was working alone on this exercise, when I should have thought of the whole team as a unit. The point of this story was to teach leadership skills, and, in that experience, I had to remember that together, we can achieve the objective quickly, reduce chaos, and ensure the safety of the whole team by working as a unit.

The lesson in this has transcended my military career into every business I have had the pleasure of leading or managing. That to lead effectively, we must be open to listening to our team members or employees, to trust them to meet their responsibilities and achieve their goals, such that the whole business moves together into a sustainable future; because there is a difference in creating a self-made job versus a business that is an asset that can grow beyond yourself.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am nearing the end of the writing phase for my new book called Leadership Skills for Small Business Owners: Leading Yourself, Your Team, Your Prospects and Your Market. I’ve interviewed over a dozen amazing business leaders on the topic of leadership skills needed to grow their business and I think that their alignment with much of my content will help small business owners think differently about leadership and allow them to empower their teams to power their business to new heights.

For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about your experience with building lasting customer relationships? Can you share an anecdote or two that illustrates your experience in this area?

Absolutely, my first experience with building lasting customer relationships, came from a set of rules that my grandfather, Jack Green, called the “Customer Bill of Rights”, when operating his chain of grocery stores back in the 60’s and 70’s in the Daytona Beach community of Port Orange. Jack said that every customer can fire the whole company by taking his business somewhere else if you didn’t treat them right. The rule that made the most impact to me was “Get to know your customers by name” By doing so, he wanted to shift the relationship from a transactional relationship to a shared sense of community between the customer and the business. We are, after all, living in the same communities or near where most of our customers live. This experience left a lasting impression and is a key strategy for creating lasting relationships.

In today’s fast-paced and constantly evolving landscape, what strategies do you employ to maintain a strong connection with your customers and anticipate their changing needs?

Developing a valuable and durable customer relationship begins before a person (and let’s face it, when dealing B2B you are working with a person) becomes a customer. In today’s speed of information, people are pretty far along in the buyer’s journey before they walk into your store or office and cultivating a relationship starts here and ends when there is no longer a sense of trust or utility in the relationship.

Can you discuss the strategies that companies can employ to strike a balance between driving revenue and profitability, and focusing on building customer relationships and loyalty?

One of the simplest strategies that companies can employ to strike a balance here is through personalization of our messaging. For example, a relationship starts when we exchange something of value, even token value, for the permission to contact that person. We normally do this with a form on our website that ties to our CRM, so we can capture their name and email address. We can then use their name, so we can communicate by email using their name directly. The simplicity of this personalization tactic can make our message much more likely to elicit a response or invoke a call to action.

Another strategy that a business can take is to create a map or ideal flow of your initial and subsequent customer interactions, that allow you to probe and collect information that you can later feed into your CRM or into your current conversation, so you can create personalized responses that lead the customer towards the close. Customers want to know that you understand their problem and its up to you to establish trust that you can provide the result that the customer wants. If you do not speak to their needs better than they can express their problem and demonstrate that you can offer them the right solution, or refer them to someone who can, then you will fail to gain trust and lose the sale. Remember, referring to someone else will build more credibility than selling something that will not fix their problem.

Could you describe the metrics and measures you use to evaluate the success of your customer relationship-building efforts, and how you identify areas for improvement?

There are a couple metrics I recommend that you track to better understand your customer relationship-building effectiveness. These are:

• The percentage change in customer count. A consistently positive number indicates that customers want a relationship with your business.
• Average customer lifetime duration (in months). A customer’s lifetime duration should only count the number of months a customer conducted one or more transactions.
• Transaction frequency. How frequently does the average customer make a purchase? Higher frequency transactions are a good indication of relationship strength. Whereas a sudden decrease in transactions may require immediate analysis and adjustments.

Regarding customer-facing teams, what steps do you take to ensure they can deliver personalized, proactive, and efficient support, tailored to the needs of each individual customer?

The most important step we can take to ensure your customer-facing teams can deliver personalized, proactive, and efficient support is to have enough training and training experience (including role play) on your best scripts, FAQ&A list, and objections, and customer provided notes and information from earlier conversations, so they can reference best available information from memory so that they can fill the role of expert that the customer needs at that moment and move the conversation past doubts or delays to the next appropriate close. Having an ideal map of how a customer conversation will go will improve your ability to be the expert, lead the conversation to a positive resolution, and maintain trust.

What tips do you have for responding to negative feedback from customers, and what steps can be taken to turn those experiences into positive outcomes?

A customer providing negative feedback is not yet a lost customer, unless you handle the feedback incorrectly. Negative feedback is a challenge, but if a customer is expressing negative feedback, take it as a gift. It is the gift of opportunity, to make things better and improve your practice so that you might avoid this situation in the future. Ignoring an opportunity like negative feedback will result in continued lost business. Feedback makes us better and we can thank this customer for helping us detect a problem.

Lastly, how do you use technology or AI to enhance your customer relationships, and what tools have you found to be most effective in building and maintaining them?

I have been a long-time fan of basic email automation to help personalize and enhance customer relationships. With a new understanding of what AI can do for our digital marketing and content creation, we can take personalization much further. However, at this early stage of AI development, we need to be careful to proofread and curate any automated content for errors, inaccuracies, or falsehoods. These types of things can turn off a customer from your business if they feel that your messaging no longer resonates with their needs.

Here is the main question of our interview. In your experience, what are five key components of building lasting customer relationships? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

1. Begin building trust with your market before the opportunity to speak. By developing a strong and trustworthy brand, compelling value, and providing educational information on the answer to their problem or desired result, you can begin talking and asking questions.
2. Dale Carnegie suggested asking questions that the people want to answer. Ask, do not presume to know the problem they have or the result they want to achieve, but ask it in a way that leads towards the next step. Ask, why is that important? How long have you been dealing with this? How long do you want to keep things as they are today? What happens if you do nothing?
3. Make it easy to say yes (on both sides of the table). We want to have a positive converting conversation that the customer can say yes to. When they counter, be prepared to down-sell or offer terms to get to the yes.
4. Offer a way to celebrate your customers’ wins when their problem is solved, or result achieved by asking for testimonials and their permission to share their story. Their success becomes part of your story and you both become part of a larger shared story. This level of inclusiveness can endear a customer and earn loyalty.
5. Speaking of loyalty, the trust of a customer should never be betrayed. All the work you’ve put into cultivating a customer relationship will be gone the second that they think that trust has been broken, privacy stolen or sold, or hear negative news in the press about you or your business.

How do you ensure that these ideas are implemented throughout the customer journey?

Trust must be built with every interaction, from your information materials, your website, your social media pages, your advertising, to the first voice they hear on the phone, or person they meet in your store or office. So, trust starts with a culture of honesty and dependability. We help business owners create a culture of trust in everything they do, starting with being honest with themselves about the state of their own business and demonstrating with data how to measure the impact of a decision to implement strategies that foster a longer and positive customer relationship.

We are nearly done. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, I would want people to listen well, think before speaking, and be kind to everyone (including yourself).

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can follow my work online at https://www.melbournebusinessadvisors.com or with my company LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/melbourne-business-advisors You can also find Melbourne Business Advisors on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/melbbizadvisors/

Thank you for the interview. We wish you only continued success!