Building Healthy Customer Relationships

By Barbara Silva

Building healthy customer relationships is a process.It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen by accident. It is a well thought out series of connections designed to let your customer know that you can help them meet a need and that their association with you will continue to benefit them.

Steps to Building Healthy Customer Relationships

Meet the customer where they are - speak to them in their language - treat them as friends, not numbers or dollar signs.

Be specific about the problems your customer is looking to solve.

Go beyond the surface.This is about really knowing your target market. Sure, they'd like more money, better health, more time - but what would they do with these things?

Baby boomers may want more energy so they can keep up with their grandchildren. For baby boomers, more money is a security issue - for example those who are caring for aging parents in addition to worrying about their own retirement.

Younger people may want more money to establish a certain lifestyle or to avoid the rat race they seen their parents trapped in.

This is why you have to know who it is you are speaking to and look at what is important to them.

Let them know you can help with the solution.

Once you've tapped into the need, you can begin teaching ways your customers can fill that need.

When you are first building healthy customer relationships, this can simply be reaching out to them and letting them know you are willing to listen.

You can establish rapport by showing empathy and understanding.

Offer help with no strings attached to develop trust and credibility

Look at everything from your customer's point of view.

Because building a healthy relationship is a process, you must be willing to nurture it and give it time to grow.

Social media is a wonderful vehicle to do this.It offers lots of chances to develop relationships that are not mired in the sales process right away.

Here, you can get to know about your potential customers on a deeper level. It takes the guess work out of what it is they are really looking for. It makes it much easier to know how they will perceive you, your business, and your products and services.

In the relaxed atmosphere of a conversation, you can reap a goldmine of information on how your customer sees their problem and what it is they really want. They may say they want more energy, but what they really want is escape from the pressures of their job or family discord. Now you have a much better idea if your services are a good fit for them.

Relationship marketing is about building relationships, establishing a human connection and letting a sale take place organically. Twitter, Facebook, content sharing sites like hubpages and interactive blogs lend themselves to these interactions with others who share similar interests. Learning how to use these sites effectively is part of the training offered at Renegade Professional.

Lead Generation Tool?

A person may come to your site on business building, but actually connect with you because of the photo you have posted of your dog.

The dog may have nothing whatsoever to do with your business, but if a love of dogs is the start of a conversation with that potential customer; you're ahead of the game already.

You may sell nutritional products. Instead of trying to sell your products to this customer right off the bat, you might instead direct them to a healthy supplement for their dog. One of my clients established contact with me by giving me a list of websites on dog wellness. Another sent me to a site to help me cope with the loss of my oldest dog.

These two people and I are not in the dog business, but we are definitely building healthy customer relationships based on a common interest. Not only are they likely to buy from me, but I in turn am likely to buy from them!

Barbara Silva, as seen in MIM Mentors in Motion Magazine, brings over thirty years teaching experience to her coaching and internet marketing training business. She specializes in teaching attraction marketing, customer/team relationship building and quality article marketing to business owners through her own programs and Renegade Professional. She heads up the one-on-one coaching program at Renegade Professional. Barbara is the author of Romancing the Sale: How to Build and Maintain Highly Profitable Customer Relationships That Last.

Comments

[Angela Brooks]

What a great post - I had this happen with one of my best customers! She and I both are dog lovers and I commented on HER blog about a dog post she had up - we began chatting and I had just what she was looking for -