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Building a long-term relationship Print E-mail
Relationship marketing is the holy grail of account management, having raving fans rather than complaints that just haven't discovered your cock-ups yet, though, takes company wide approach to customers. You can, however, borrow some of the corporate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) principles to improve key client relationships. Relationship marketing is the business school term for building a long term client relationship based on trust and partnership. It starts once you have turned a prospect into customer – your initial sell will have to lay the ground work for this developing relationship but it the communication you have with them after this that will build an enhanced relationship. The ‘Loyalty ladder’ comes from Christopher et al 1991:



Getting to the point where a customer is a raving advocate about your product may seem like a long way off and reaching it might entail a new strategy for the whole organisation. Everyone needs to be focused on building customer trust and it can incur costs. You can use the philosophy though on a smaller scale by looking at each stage on the ladder and seeing what you have to do in order to move individual key clients upwards.
Areas to look at to help develop longer term relationships:
Levels of customer contact, how often and how many people within the organisation you have positive contacts with.
Levels of service you currently offer
Dependence of their success on your business
Quality of service they experience during all contacts with your organisation
High element of trust

To see where you are now you need to do some research; start by looking at each point of contact the customer has with your organisation and see if you can gauge how good it is for them. From reception to accounts, does everyone treat your customer as thought they were the only one in the world. Ultimately you're going to have to ask the customer how good the service is and where you can improve but you'll also need to start thinking like your clients.

Next, look at your networking: How well do you know each client? Look at each key account in terms of who in the organisation makes decisions to buy and specify your product/ service. As well as the buyers whose job it is to compare and assess the options there are also a raft other influencers and more importantly people who can draw a red pen through the middle of your order before an order number ever gets raised. The person who signs off the budget for the overall spend is hard to get to but they are a likely to be cause of new initiatives being shelved and extraneous costs being trimmed. If they are an ally you stand less chance of being viewed as a cost rather than an investment. Getting to know these people will take a lot of time and a good strategy.

Finally and most crucially, who uses the service you provide - who is actually going to miss it if you are no longer the provider, or if there is no provider in future.

I worked with an online recruitment company a few years ago who were giving recruitment consultants free advertising to incentivise them to use the site and build traffic.  Even though it was only for a limited time and was potentially worth a lot of money they couldn’t get individual consultants to upload the jobs regularly. The reason was that the website had been sold very well to the management team but no-one had sold it to the consultants. To them it was just another new website and they liked their old suppliers, the uploading was easy and they knew the sales people if they needed help.

Building a relationship should be a long term commitment and will require a strategic approach to individual clients so you may have to choose which key accounts get the new service levels first. You should also look at the client base as a whole and try to get an honest appraisal of how good your relationships currently are overall and ask yourself how you take the next step up the ladder.