Building Lifelong Customers and Friends Relationships

In the past, to succeed in business, salespeople had to work 80% of their time prospecting new market and only 20% of their time working on their relationship management. Today, it’s all different. To succeed in business, to create more life opportunities, you need to work mainly at creating, developing, and managing your relationships. Forget about the vendor etiquette you once heard it’s good to post on the front head, now, in today competitive market, you have to be the partner, the friend.

As a company executive, salesperson, or simply as an individual, what do you think your most valuable asset really is? Researches have shown that the most valuable asset today is your relationship. Building lifelong relationship is the most rewarding task you can do for yourself and for your company today.How do you position yourself in your customer/friends mind?

What would be the dominant perception? Everything in today’s world is perception. That is why the way you are perceive can either help you or hurt you, absolutely everything when it comes to perception counts. What attributes would your customers/friends use if we were to wake them up at 4 o’clock in the morning and ask them what they think about you?

To build lifelong customer/friends relationships, we want to make sure to be perceived as following:
- You constantly work at improving their life or business
- You are always there when they need you and help solving their problems
- You are a strategic thinker, helping them to see what they can be in the future
- You understand their situations.

Once the dominant perception is done, the next step you want to work on is your personal positioning. Stop fooling yourself, people go along with you according to the position you have in their mind and the image you reflect. Here are some qualifications they judge you on:

Trust – Do you position yourself or your company as someone or a company we can trust. we can count on, and that is reliable?

Domain of expertise - Which area are you r your company expert in? When you position yourself as expert in one domain, the good thing is that once someone is in need of that expertise, it’s your name that will pop out instantly.

Customer/Friend knowledge – Whatever the type of relationship you have withpeople, for that relationship to win the test of time, you need to show the persons or the company that you care about them. Genuine interest here is important. How much do you know of the other person? How much do you of the company you want to win the business? And it’s so easy to show someone that you care about him. Simply ask questions, give feedbacks, double check with them, give recommendations.

Professional position - Always remember people around you, even if they do not say so, want to be successful and the one way they look at getting there is to walk with people who are successful. Even if humility is a great appreciated quality, telling about your title and achievements at work or telling about the market share of your company and how long you’ve been in business will definitely help in giving you credit and making you legit. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it by yourself, then you can let people tell about you using testimonials for instance.

Professionalism - We tend to believe sometimes that professionalism is only good when we are at work. Well, at home, at a social event, in transport, the way you handle yourself counts. The way you carry yourself counts. the way you behave around people counts. No need to say how even more important it is in a working environment.

People, today, buy the result they will benefit from being in relationship with you. If their profit of being in relationship with you is high, the demands of that relationship are low, you show that you care about them, people will always keep up with you. Also, if you find a way to constantly serve your friends/customers and friends’ friends/customers’ customers, then you will always be part of their closed circles. Just like the life and sales expert, motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said: you can have anything in live you want if you can help enough others get what they want.