When you work with multiple customers, with multiple contracts you can very easily get lost in these customers. And yes you are providing a valuable service to your customers, however are they adding value to your business?
See business relationships are just that, relationships, and it takes effort by both parties to ensure a long term successful and sustainable relationship. And to put it bluntly, if you are not working towards that, you are wasting your time.
Building long term relationships takes time and effort and building trust is a huge part of that, and again, I mean that for both parties. This is as relevant to you as a customer as it is a supplier. A Valuable business works hard on both sides, customer and supplier to ensure a successful and effective supply chain. This makes sense as aren’t you all part of the same journey, that is to protect the end user / customer?
And one thing is for sure, you can’t build a valuable business with customers who do not add value to your business. If 30% (generally a conservative figure) of your customers are costing you more time and money than you projected, that’s directly eating in to your net profits, which has a significant impact on the value of your business. However if you think that is substantial, that isn’t even the real loss, as the real loss is that you aren’t spending that 30% of your time with valuable customers that could truly make a difference to your business.
So to be clear, you can only build a valuable business based on valuable clients. So how do you do that…?
I bring my customers through a 4 stepped process to ensure they are doing their upmost to build successful relationships. This doesn’t happen over night and I always preach the ‘little often’ approach as opposed to the ‘a lot a little’ and that all boils back down to building strong systems where it adds value to your business.
