Business is constantly changing and reinventing itself. I spoke at an event recently about growing relationship based businesses. I preparing my initial thinking was summed up in the question: surely every business is relationship based? So it is; you have no sales without having a basic relationship with a customer. Firstly I gave a great deal of thought about defining what a ‘Relationship Based Business’ was and came to the conclusion it is:
Ensuring a successful relationship, through communication and collaboration embodying a value based approach in order to win business.
Modern business demands that we are able to maximise value to our customers; we achieve this through our relationship and by building a partnership. Customer relationship management (CRM) has long been on the agenda for business growth – yet to many this is merely an IT system rather than a way of life for the organisation. With Social Media there is a need for a more holistic customer relationship management process. We talk to customers and prospects, we address their concerns while building a relationship with them in a public forum. The relationship we build is not one-to-one, it is based on the needs of one individual but is is visible to a much broader audience (in fact it can be visible to the entire world).
There is an old maxim that we hold out friends close and our enemies even closer. In Social Media Land it is important to build relationships with your customers and with prospects alike – the reasons are obvious; because we wish to do business with them. We also need to build relationships with competitors – why? to know what they are saying and doing of course. Then there are a wealth of other people that we need to build relationships with, including researchers, writers, industry experts, shipping companies, suppliers, etc, etc. Social Media impacts them all.
Ultimately there is a sphere of influence that extends beyond the organisation, its staff, its suppliers, its customers. This must by its public nature extend to the industry at large; it is like everything that we do being published in a trade journal for all to see. That sphere of influence is becoming increasingly visible and our competitors are already leveraging it to their advantage.
Generally we would all like to think that improving our visibility is good, we all want that – it drives in business. Dell Computer has stated that it expects to have sales of over $6 million through its activity in Social Media channels in 2010. This level of sales comes about through a commitment to Social Media that operates across the company. It comes from answering marketplace questions about Windows, PC faults etc. Dell takes an approach that ensure responses are made by people with the real knowledge – it is more likely to be the product designer than a marketing person because they do not want a ‘marketing spin’ put on the story. The response must be focused, accurate and deliver knowledge to the person needing it. This delivers VALUE to the customer, or prospect.
This dialogue wins friends in the marketplace, not only is the person with the problem impressed that a mega-corporation took the time to respond, but they did so in a timely and accurate manner, even when the question related to another company’s product. For Dell this pays dividends because that person will add the company to their shortlist when they are looking for a new product that Dell sells – Dell will be on the shortlist. The other aspect about this dialogue is that it is public and clearly visible to other people encountering the similar questions, yet have not put finger to keyboard to ask the question.
Yet there is also a negative side to all of this visibility: our failings can be seen by all as well. Again though this needs to be managed in an open and honest way. Businesses are driven by people and as we all know people do make mistakes. Our faults must be managed, business needs an intelligent intervention in the Social Media space to understand what is being said about our brands and to respond appropriately.
BUT Surely the reason I want my business to be using Social Media is to sell more products?
Yes, that is true. Yet moving traditional ‘push-based’ marketing techniques into the Social Media space meets with only limited success. Your business can advertise on Social Media sites, it can even focus the advertising to appeal to specific audiences, but remember more than ever before people have learned to tune-out advertising on web sites – because they have a purpose, a goal, and responding to that advert no matter how compelling will mean they delay or do not reach their goal. Involvement in Social Media means more than simply advertising, it means being involved. Through this general introduction to relationship based business it should be clear that the key elements are:
☼ Improving the way we communicate and collaborate
☼ Intelligently intervening in the marketplace
☼ Through this building a revenue stream
Obviously revenue is important, we could not survive long in business without it. These three elements are closely bound together in a relationship based business. Part of selling is providing a solution for other people’s problems. We are better able to provide solutions by understanding those problems; listening; asking questions; building relationships; envisioning solutions. This is at the heart of a social media engagement and building a market intelligence which can be leveraged to build the business.
It may be that building sales through trusted relationship takes a longer sales cycle, but yet people may also be lining up at your door because of your Social Media intervention. Some sales take more patience than others but then you are adding value through every communication in an holistic way. One of the longer term results will be increasing customer loyalty around specific products – something that has been lacking of late in certain industry sectors. In fact brand loyalty can be put back on the agenda through correct use of Social Media.
