Business Relationships

Business Relationship Skills

Your organisation may have people who have to do more than present what your company has to offer to prospective clients. They may have to build the kind of long-term business relationships that ensure your company is well-trusted, which in turn ensures steady business. 

You may have technical experts who are brilliant within their own field, but lose confidence when having to create better business relationships and fall back on their expertise (thus potentially boring the client and dazzling them with too many facts and figures). 

Gaining clients' confidence and trust in you and your company is key to developing good business relationships. Too often, consultants, sales people or other company representatives go into meetings like 'gangbusters' deluging clients (or potential clients) with too much information and barely drawing breath. 

Business Relationship Building is all about the fact that it's 'you they buy' at gut level. Clearly, they are interested in what your company has to offer or you wouldn't be having meetings with them in the first place, but for the duration of those meetings you are the company. 

This means that it's less about your product and a whole lot more about how you connect and engage with your client. You need to be a 'safe pair of hands' and at the same time have the skills to engender trust, understand your clients needs and get under the skin of what is going on their company. 

Equally important, is the ability to 'suss out' unspoken agendas and to deliver messages the client may not want to hear. What we mean here is that often a client thinks they know what they want and once you dig around a bit you realise that they need something quite different or in addition to. 

On the other hand, sometimes clients can be a bit vague and only have a general idea of what they want, so part of business relationship building is to tease out needed information without giving them the third degree. 

Whether it's a 'beauty parade', a tender presentation, an informal meeting or a straightforward pitch for business, the better your Business Relationship Building Skills, the better your chances are of convincing them to 'buy you'. 

If you need your people to win more business through creating stronger face-to-face relationships, talk to us about a Tailored Business Relationship Management programme.