Building client relationships is ‘selling 101’ these days. If you don’t have a relationship with your customers/clients, you will not have orders for very long. Those relationships are certainly much different than they were only five or 10 years ago though.
Hitting the road and dropping off boxes of donuts will no longer be enough to sustain a long-term partnership. You must add value to the process, and as much as I like donuts, they are not valued. I can buy my own.
Buyers today need someone who is going to look out for them and help them with a problem they have, even if the customer didn’t know they had that problem. Being customer-centric will equal a profitable, healthy business in the long term. It just takes understanding your customers, working with them as partners, and taking a good long-term look at what those interactions with your customers mean.
—MontCo Consulting
