As a business leader, building long-lasting business relationships is essential to your ongoing success. Even if business development doesn't come naturally or you are introverted, you can excel at this vital skill.
The benefits of transforming your short-term, single-project clients into permanent, productive business partners will lead to client loyalty, repeat work, incoming referrals, networking outreach, reduced marketing costs, and other advantages that will affect your bottom line. When treated as a partner, a client will be far more likely to listen to you with trust and genuinely appreciate the work that you do for them.
Establishing and maintaining “partner-level” amounts of trust, acceptance, understanding, and camaraderie is certainly not simple. You have to plan for this and have systems and processes so everyone in your firm can help build and maintain strong relationships with the clients you serve.
In this blog post we will discuss ten guidelines to help you build long-lasting business relationships and further your reputation as a strong partner.
1. Establish an Authentic Connection and Brand Voice
The best business development people understand that they need to be authentic when the communicate with their ideal customers. They are open, honest, and probably ask more questions than they talk about themselves. They also hone in on the unique offering their business provides and have a clear message.
To achieve this, take honest stock in your firm and what makes it unique in the marketplace. What can you do that is different or better than your competitors? What makes you stand apart? Who are the ideal customers that have a problem you can help solve? How do you create value for these customers?
Branding for an architecture or engineering firm that is truly aligned with the company’s culture, values, and target market will powerfully connect with customers who align with the same values. And if you want to truly be a thought leader and build trust with your audience, you have to take a stance and have an opinion about your area of expertise. This enables you to be authentic and talk about your values and beliefs to better connect with people, rather than adjusting your message for all opportunities. If you try to be everything to everyone you won't have a strong connection and will come off as being more salesy or insincere.
2. Identify Common Values and Goals
Once you have established an authentic voice that aligns with your firm's values, communicate that identity clearly to current and prospective clients. Use multiple channels including your website copy, social media posts, newsletters and publications, as well as in-person presentations or meetings. Stay true to your values and topics you are passionate about to maintain your authenticity. This will help you resonate with the ideal clients who share these values and goals. The point here is to create something in common with your ideal customers.
Relationships between firms and their clients are far stronger when they are based on a foundation of mutual understanding and shared principles. At the end of the day you are building a relationship between people. People hire other people, not companies, so it is important to establish yourself or others in your firm as the trustworthy experts in your field.
3. Complete Diligent Client Research
This is an incredibly important part of business development, and one of the primary reasons your firm should focus on specific markets. You should be able to easily identify groups of people you want to reach out to. For example. BQE makes software that serves Architecture and Engineering firms, as well as some other consultants and professional services businesses. This makes it relatively easy for us to indentify specific lists of potential customers. We can research every architecture firm or Engineering firm in a specific region and craft messaging that speaks directly to their challenges. We can attend events, and build relationships directly with this target market.
Your firm should be able to do this as well. You should know exactly who might be looking for your services in the future. Is it facility managers at private universities? Or maybe you specialize in fire stations and need to reach fire chiefs in the southern states. Perhaps your firm specializes in national retail chains so you need a list of real estate managers for large retail companies. The point here is you should know the group you want to communicate with to the specificity needed that you can research specific names and titles, understand where they network, what publications they read, what they are concerned about, what questions they are asking, and what their values are.
Using this research you can then better connect the dots between their challenges and how you can help solve them. It is difficult to lay a foundation of common understanding and principles without acquiring in-depth information about each of your potential and current clients. Pay particular attention to their preferred methods of communication, learning their industry-specific jargon, and seeking out information or news publications about their industry, their businesses or organization, and about each individual you will meet with.
4. Set Clear Expectations for Your Client and your Firm and Be Accountable to Them
All partnerships are a two-way street. It is important for both sides to be clear about their expectations and what you will deliver. This is imperative for building trust.
Meaning, your firm needs to deliver on its promises. When you tell a client you will do something, it is imperative that you fulfill the expectation you just set. This means delivering the scope as outlined, and delivering it by the deadline you set.
This is the least you can do to foster strong business relationships. When possible you should look for ways to exceed this baseline, so you deliver an exceptional client experience above and beyond what they were expecting. The supreme importance of expectation-setting and final accountability cannot be overstated.
The key to this point is communicating with your client, but also with your team. If they don't know what was agreed to, what the deliverables are, what the deadlines are, what promises you may have made outside of the contract, they can't meet the expectations you have set. Be very clear with your team what they have to do to meet and exceed the expectations that your clients have for your services. And empower the team to find ways to delight clients in ways that turns them from customers into advocates for your services.
5. Use Email for Frequent and Direct Contact
Like it or not, emails regular emails are a vital part of any relationship-building process. Sometimes this takes the shape of e-newsletters that are used to educate your client base, make important business announcements, or communicate special offers. Although managing ongoing email campaigns can be time-consuming, state-of-the-art client relationship management (CRM) technology such as BQE’s CORE CRM can prove crucial in these efforts.
Beyond these larger marketing emails that go out to larger groups of people, it is also important to establish a frequent cadence of emails directly to your clients or prospective clients. These should be short personalized emails that are speaking directly about the projects on the boards or provide value and build trust with potential clients.
Best practice is to send a weekly project update to every client as a minimal level of engagement. Every project manager should make this a habit. Every Friday send out a short email to all the clients you work with simply giving them an update on what what worked on that week, what deadlines are coming up, and any other important information that they should know to put them at ease. These should be simple, short, emails of 3-4 sentences. The goal is simply to provide peace of mind for your clients. It is always better to update them before they reach out to you asking for an update. This is a great way to start building an exceptional client experience.
6. Place a High Value on Face-to-Face Contact
While email is still an important communication tool, it isn't effective in all situations. There is simply no substitute for the power of good, old-fashioned, face-to-face interaction. Unfortunately, with recent changes in the world this is becoming less common. And younger generations tend to shy away from phone calls or inviting people to meet up.
In your firm make sure to emphasize building relationships in real life as a differentiator from your competition. Schedule routine, check-in meetings in-person whenever possible, or via videoconferencing if you must, to answer questions and ensure that you and the client are on the same page. Don't think that sending an email is enough when you are trying to communicate on critical project decisions.
If you happen to be in the neighborhood whether in your hometown or on a business trip, a quick “hello” visit can go an incredibly long way. Stop by your client's office or locations. Invite them out for coffee, lunch or a happy hour drink. Throw regular office parties and invite all of your past, current, and prospective clients.
Find excuses to meet with people as often as possible. This is the best way to build strong relationships.
7. Streamline Your Invoicing and Payment Processes
Invoicing is an important part of the client experience working with you, and you should design this process intentionally to be a valuable touch point with your clients. It is also another place that can be a differentiator between your firm and others.
Nobody likes to get a bill, but invoicing is a lot easier to take when it is predictable, accurate, and consistent. If you’re still sending out invoices manually through the mail you can greatly improve your client relationships by employing an integrated digital invoicing and payments system such as those offered through BQE CORE.
Electronic payments are received faster, are easier for clients to process, and get paid over 30% faster based on our data. Plus it can save your team team using systems like BQE CORE's batch invoicing tools.
Other than saving time and being more convenient for your team and your clients, invoices are a reflection of your brand and your values. Invoices should be designed to be clear, easy to understand, and correspond to the original agreement, all while being designed with your companies branding.
8. Seek Honest and Ongoing Feedback
Actionable client feedback can do wonders when it comes to improving your business while building stronger relationships and trust. Simply asking for feedback communicates a clear message to your clients that their opinions and feelings matter to you.
Don’t wait until a client project is over before soliciting feedback or asking how you can improve your services. Client responses and reactions should matter at all stages and phases of project and relationship management. Plus, if you get feedback early in an engagement with a client it gives you time to make adjustments and improvements to serve that project better. Ideally this improves the client experience and makes them advocates for your firm, leading to referrals and repeat work.
We recommend asking for feedback after each phase of a project. Come up with a form or list of standard questions you will ask. Make this a standard operating procedure and train all of your staff to request this feedback. Then review the results as a team to identify areas you will work to improve upon.
When clients see that you are listening to them and actively making changes, they will feel a stronger connection to your firm and their project team.
9. Leverage the Power of the Latest Professional Services Software
To take your firm and your client relationships to the next level, a high quality professional services firm management platform is an absolute must. Not only will your clients appreciate the high degree of professionalism, but you will be able to free up valuable time that you can devote exclusively to relationship-building. The BQE CORE platform can help with everything from working time and expense tracking to project and human resource management.
Although your firm management isn't a directly client facing aspect of your business, running a smooth operation that keeps teams on track, projects on schedule and on budget, and simplifies the invoicing and payment process does have a direct impact on your clients and how they feel about working with you. Having up to date systems and processes will help you build stronger relationships and help your business prosper.
10. Go Beyond Pure Business
Clients are, first and foremost, human beings, and they like to be treated as such. You should find ways to relate to them outside of just business talk. Even the most businesslike of people will appreciate a human touch when it comes to relationship-building.
Think about involving your clients in things that have nothing to do with the daily grind of the business world. Consider sponsoring a community event, providing clients with entertainment, sending cards to mark holidays/special occasions, or just sparking up a sincere and meaningful personal conversation.
Look for opportunities to reach out randomly, not because you have a project update or questions, but because something reminded you of them. If you see an article about their business or a past project you did together, that would be a perfect trigger to shoot someone an email to say hi. If they had a major life event, like a marriage or birth of a child, send a small gift or a note recognizing their achievement.
These sorts of small human connections will go a long way towards establishing a relationship that is more than transactional.
Additional Business Development Resources for A&E Firms:
-
-
-
-
-
-
