By Guest Expert Author, Joanna Gaudoin, Inside Out Image
Who knows you outside of your business? It’s probably a reasonable list of people. But how well are you leveraging your professional network to support your business growth?
When it comes to our own marketing, sales and business development strategies, your own professional relationships are key – however, it’s too easy to neglect or sideline them.
I’m Joanna Gaudoin and I work with City Professionals showing them how to build and use their professional network to drive business growth. As a successful business owner and entrepreneur, I use the advice and skills I give these top city firms in my own business.
Today, I’m sharing with you some of the main reasons why relationships will help your business (whatever size it is) achieve success, and then I’ll give you three top tips to implement.
Why do professional relationships matter for your business?
Relationships have always played an important role in growing any business. Most of these relationships start with networking or introductions, and then it’s up to you to maintain and develop them.
As a business owner, I know what it’s like to be managing the delivery of services, running the business and bringing in new business. It can be too easy to de-prioritise those crucial relationships. What keeps me motivated is knowing how important relationships are to so many areas of running a successful business.
Why professional relationships matter
- Increase customer loyalty
- Stay current in your sector or industry
- Get yourself known in the market
- Find suitable suppliers or partners to work with
- Find new customers
Tips on maintaining these relationships
Here are my top 5 ‘why these relationships matter’ reasons:
Increase customer loyalty
Our clients need to feel valued; many small and growing businesses instinctively understand that. The hard business reason is that if your clients don’t feel valued, they can easily go to other suppliers for your services.
However, if you build trust and a great relationship, they’re less likely to move away even when your prices / fees increase.
They will rationalise that it isn’t worth the hassle and this is reinforced by the loyalty they feel towards you.
Stay current in your sector or industry
Attending conferences and events that are relevant to your sector or relevant to your target segments allows you to keep up to date with what is happening in yours and theirs market-place.
These conferences are good opportunities to increase your knowledge about your profession, to stay up to date, and for marketplace research. They can also inspire you with ideas for your marketing and personal communications with your segments – giving you a reputation for being current and up-to-date with what is going on.
Given a choice, who do we want to work with? The person with their finger on the pulse or the one who is lagging behind not knowing what is going on?
Get yourself known in the market
Many opportunities are ‘hidden’. It is still about who you know. The better known you are, for the right reasons, the more of these ‘opportunities’ you will find.
For example, I get most of my high-profile speaking work and networking invitations to unpublicised events through invitation only because of being ‘known’.
These are opportunities that I can look for on-line but they are ‘hidden’. You might find this with being invited to attend an event; invited to tender; getting referrals.
It is your job to be visible so the market knows you and the ‘hidden’ opportunities come to you.
Find suitable suppliers or partners to work with
Your business needs more than you. And when you want to bring in suppliers or partners to work with, it should be your network that you turn to and ask for suitable people; rather than having to ‘find’ trusted suppliers and partners cold.
Find new customers
Those professional relationships you’re building mean that you already know your next ‘new’ customer or the person who is going to refer them to. The wider your relevant network is and deeper the relationships you have with the people in it, the more new business you will get from them.
You can read more about the importance of External Relationships in Joanna’s book, ‘Getting on – making work work’.
My top three tips for building and maintaining these relationships.
Tip 1. Have a networking strategy
You probably already do networking; but do you have a networking strategy? Your time will be precious, so a networking strategy ensures you are making the most of this precious resource. So, your networking strategy needs to have two elements:
1. Define who you want to meet
2. Figure out where you are most likely to meet them.
This means that you can focus your time and effort on the networking events that are going to best work for you and your business.
Note: you might need different networks to cover off all five of the ‘why’ areas. For example, one networking group might be great for meeting new suppliers or partners, and another one great for finding new customers.
Tip 2. Start conversations with a point of commonality
Whether you’re at an event meeting new people or catching up with people you already know, resist the urge to dive straight into a ‘work’ conversation. It’s important to be human first and connect on that level. Start with a point of commonality.
Good ones I use are:
- What they thought of today’s event/speaker
- Where they have travelled from / how their journey was
- Once you have connected in this way, you now have permission to move into their professional live.
- One question that can neatly move the conversation from ‘pleasure’ to ‘professional’ is: “So, how’s work going at the moment?”
This signals a change in the conversation in a non-threatening way as it allows them to decide how to answer it and which aspect of work to discuss first.
Tip 3. Diarise staying in touch
My diary is full of people I am staying in touch with. Why would I go to all that effort of finding and building my own professional network if I then don’t maintain it?
Again, it can be too easy to let this slip, so do what you need to make sure you prioritise this.
Some of the tricks my clients use are:
- Setting ‘targets’ for the number of ‘stay in touch’ calls / coffees they will have each month
- Setting Calendar reminders to get back in touch with people
- Running ‘client only / invitation only’ webinars / events / meet-ups, so you can do one ‘blast’ of staying in touch with many people. This can be as low-key or impressive as you like.
To finish…
Whatever size organisation you are in and your role there, personal relationships are key to your business growth and success.
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