No matter what field of work you are a part of, relationships have always mattered, and with time, they have become an important part of our business success. However, a report by TrustRadius in 2018 has shown that there are many buyers who are looking for something more than just vendors. They want more partnerships and engagement.
More often than not, there are many businesses that do not value the potential success that comes with indulging in business relationship practices. Over time, the loss of priority for this approach has caused many businesses to meet their downfall despite having exceptional products or business services.
Fortunately, we have been witnessing the B2B companies valuing their business relationships more than ever before. In fact, many companies have begun to add in special teams and specialists that are focused on customer success and tend to stay close to clients to understand them better for future business purposes. B2B companies are some of the few business industries that have understood the significance of customer relationships and are now entirely focused on devoting their time and energy to these approaches.
Additionally, focusing on customer relationships not only offers your audience better services but also provides companies with bonus benefits. For example, customers will be more honest when they begin to trust your company and honest feedback is vital for improving your business strategies and working on new innovative business ideas to appeal to your targeted audience.
So, if you are a B2B company owner who wants to know how to improve their business relationships, here are a few tips to help guide you on that track.
Helping the Support Team in Your Company
Over the years, this example that your company support teams are the biggest empathizers who navigate through a bunch of challenges to understand what makes customers happy, frustrated, and attracted to. Over time they gather an immense amount of knowledge about your targeted audience, and their intelligence helps guide them on their day-to-day decisions of producing and marketing quality products or services.
Consequently, many companies have been allowing their other departments to help or even shadow their support teams via sharing business tactics and customer service duties. For instance, you can take turns answering questions from clients with the rest of the team. The goal here is to bring everyone together so that they can look into the obscured vies into customer pain points. One of the best things that will come out from this other than improved customer support is that every member of your company will now become a customer empathizer too.
Value Over Price
Rather than focusing on the perfect price range for your next line of products or services, take the time to start investing in other parts of your business that add value to your customers and bring solutions to end their biggest pain points.
An ideal example of how to go about this tactic is to consider shifting your marketing team’s attention from pricing benefits towards the benefits of the product or services that affect the customers. Rather than emphasizing your product as a bargain, focus on specific value points that the customers expect to generate.
If you think about it, customers do not really care how much revenue you are generating, what your shareholders are expecting, or what kinds of quotas you are following. What they want is a team of professionals who can understand their queries and efficiently manage their ways to increase their own revenues.
Consequently, your marketing messages and product positions should be able to reflect how your target audience is thinking and feeling. No customer touchpoint or customer conversation should feel like a difficult sell.
Advisory Boards for Customers
One of the many ways you can get close to your customers is to avoid keeping them at arm’s length and start thinking of them as partners to your business. And what better way to get close to your customers than to start a customer advisory board?
A customer advisory board is considered as a form of market research where a group of already existing customers tends to convene on a regular basis to share their advice to company management regarding industry trends, strategic approaches, and business values.
As a business owner, it is up to you to choose where to host these formal meetings, or you can even find an easier way to connect with the board members through much simpler methods. Regardless of whichever way you decide, what really matters is to keep these board members close to your marketing and product decisions. Always ask their opinions on different products or services and position them as one of your most trusted group of confidants.
Furthermore, when planning to create a customer advisory board, you must look into several factors before setting up the final thing, such as whether you want to set up multiple boards targeted towards specific markets. Moreover, when deciding what people to add to the board, consider their background – their experience, expertise, and diverse skills play a major role in which direction your customer advisory board will strive towards.
Subscriptions as a Form of Direct Relationships
Service as a service is one of the most popular B2B models that has successfully overturned their traditional support models. Hence, customer support is mostly driven by ongoing relationships.
Despite the fact that it can cost up to more than seven times more to simply acquire a new customer than to retain your current ones, customer retention holds the same value as customer acquisition. Besides getting new users to sign up, you must also give them several incentives to stick with your company and continue supporting your business products. As such, even if you have a million customers, taking the chance to engage with each of them can bring about a significant improvement in your customer relationship.
Utilize your customer-based data and determine how and when you should approach your customers. If you notice someone might be ready to churn, you can always consult them with targeted messages or check-in emails to get things back on track.