Joel Maddison | Developer at GBC | 3 min read | May 3rd, 2021
In today’s ever-changing business world, where perfect clients have limited time with multiple options to service their needs, they can slip through the cracks if caution is not well practiced to establish harmonious relations with them while working to land them or retain their patronage. Therefore, building effective rapports should be the top priority of your business.
Just think about the relationship you have in your personal life; without mutually agreeable terms and understanding, would your connections sustain? The same is the case with your official business partners and clients in a B2B or B2C organization; both the businesses and clients prefer doing business with someone they establish a good relationship with. While face-to-face visits and meet-ups have provided the essential setting to building rapport with clients, in today’s marketplace, the global pandemic have complicated things, forcing meetings and transactions to go virtual.
Importantly, if you have never dealt with clients virtually in the past, then making online rapports with new consumers is just like a chess game, a single wrong action, and the deal slips off your hands. Therefore, to help you with building better relationships with clients – let’s explore some practical ways to create time and space for developing good relationships with clients that work:
- Lead the meeting and focus on relationship-building from the start
Building longlasting relations with clients starts from the very first day. As these unprecedented times forcing us to do business virtually, it’s still possible to make adequate space for creating rapport. Every client has thier own goals, needs, and preferences. Fundamnetally, it is crucial for you to take the time and care to ask clients about themselves before proceeding with the meeting. Try to find out:
- How are they doing?
- What are their goals?
- What is the work style they prefer?
- What are their expected results from you?
The more you know about your customer, needs, and goals, the more you will be able to adapt your services and workstyle for them specifically which helps build a lasting relationship. Understanding your clients and working with them establishes a good relationship with your client. Also, try to be formal and focus more on your clients’ requirements and expectations from you.
- End your meeting with a casual discussion
In physical meetings, some casual conversations happen once the meeting gets concluded. Allow this to be in virtual meetings as well. After finishing up with a formal part, start the casual talk with something like what happened over the weekend, opinions about current happenings in the country, some cross opinions on the current pandemic situation, etc.
Such casual conversations would allow both parties to know each other more where clients could ask questions about your business and future goals. Try to be more and more relatable with your clients and always end the meeting with mutually agreeable terms or casual talks.
- Setup short check-in meetings
During these times of “virtual business transactions”, everyone looks for stability and connections. Therefore, businesses must reach out to their clients for follow-ups to build stronger relations with them. You can send a short catch-up email to schedule an online meeting to let your clients know about their project status and make sure to always end up meeting after having their opinions over the progress. This will lead you to create a good rapport and relation as well.
- Continue building relationships outside of your meetings
Other than meetings, there are some other ways as well that allow you to create good connections with clients and building last rapport, including text messaging, LinkedIn messages and social posting, and striking emails. Don’t miss the perks these communication channels provide.
For instance, you may share the related articles according to your clients’ interests via email or private message. You may also follow their profiles on channels like LinkedIn or Facebook and add a comment or hit a “like” to their post that you find interesting. This will enable you to stay in touch with your clients outside the professional meetings and would result in a good mutual relationship.
Conclusion
Virtual connections with clients can be intricate, but they are not impossible at all. Make it necessary, for you to focus on building a strong relationship with your clients, and only then will you see better business results with respect to new client ratio and sales. Building relationships during a remote work environment could be complicated. Still, by being proactive in making the time-space rapport, you can achieve the required goals that are crucial for your company’s sales success.
Also, while handling and communicating with your clients, make sure to remember these 4R’s: Be Real, Be Relevant, Be Reliable, and Be Relatable and you are good to rule!
