12 Jul How Executives Build Lasting Business Connections
Building authentic business relationships can be crucial to your business’s success. All businesses must interact with people, vendors, and other company leaders, so it’s essential to know how to develop lasting connections. One of the first steps to establishing a relationship is appointment setting. Growing strong ties doesn’t happen overnight. It’ll take dedication, time, energy, and consistent work to nurture connections in your business network. You’ll want to have good relationships with clients and business executives you can collaborate with. This’ll help you tap into their experience for insights and support in your business.
As much as you want to build beneficial relationships, it’s also essential to not only be a taker. Your business should provide connections with valuable resources and support. Keep reading to learn more about how to get business connections that help your company scale up.
Importance of building business relationships
There are many reasons why it’s important to build business relationships. For one, it helps nurture your clients and retain existing customers. Maintaining trust and communicating with your customers keeps them loyal to your brand. Sending frequent emails, offering discounts, and excellent customer service are all examples of how you can nurture your connections.
Another critical reason to build relationships is because it connects you with C-level executives with the potential to grow your business. Setting appointments with these often busy individuals can be difficult if you don’t have an existing relationship. So, sometimes, you’ll need the help of a professional relationship management business like Linked Strategies to establish contact. With your foot in the door and by maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship with them, you’ll have a lifelong business connection.
Best practices for lasting business connections
Show the value of connecting with you
As mentioned earlier, it’s essential to show your business connections how valuable a relationship with your business is. It’s good to offer other business leaders help and support whenever possible. This can be by providing them a good deal, initial offerings, or information before it hits the public. Offering value makes the relationship more authentic, and connections know you aren’t only concerned with what you can gain from them. A significant part of your connection strategy should be figuring out what value you can give your business contacts.
Focus on educating
To help build trust with contacts, focus on educating instead of constantly trying to sell them something. It’ll allow for even more relationships and garner referrals since you’ve proven to your contacts you’re a thought leader. Educating will establish your credibility and expertise as you share relevant information. You can share resources on social media, blogs, or other channels of connecting with your audience. It gives prospective contacts visibility into your brand and insights into what you do. They’ll also learn how they can benefit from connecting with your business.
Open communication
Feedback is a potent tool for fine-tuning your strategy. What may seem like an excellent idea may not resonate with connections so learn to ask them what they think. Establish a two-way communication channel where connections know their advice and comments are appreciated and implemented. It’ll serve as a data source and give you limitless information on how to improve. You may gather feedback through surveys or simply by setting appointments with your contacts in the company. You can set up frequent meetings to discuss how they currently feel about your business.
Keep communication frequent
Keeping up with all your contacts can be a lot to handle, even with help from automation. An excellent way to ensure you’re communicating with all your contacts is to segment them into groups. When you have all your connections sorted, you can assign each of them a different priority level. You’ll want to contact your most valuable clients frequently and ensure you remain top of their minds.
Letting connections go a long time without hearing from you, even when you don’t have an offer, makes you seem disingenuous. This is not to say you shouldn’t focus on your less valuable clients. They deserve attention too. But, you can rely on a sound CRM system to build trust with them over time with periodic emails. Send them educational emails 80% of the time, and you may send offer emails as they begin to warm.
Interested in learning how to build lasting business connections that result in lucrative appointment-setting opportunities with C-level executives? Contact Linked Strategies today. We have years of training and experience creating long-lasting relationships between business owners and high-level executives. We’ll provide the guidance you need to get mutually beneficial business connections.