Building a good relationship with clients is one of the most essential factors for sustainable business growth. Most businesses focus their resources on acquiring new clients. However, not many understand that businesses do not necessarily need new clients to gain new projects. They can rely on retained clients to keep their project pipeline full and still get new clients through referrals.
Mind you, retaining clients is also quite challenging. And if not done carefully, you might lose a significant bit of the efforts and money you put in landing that killer client. This business relationship requires serious efforts from both you and the client, just like a successful romantic relationship. With that said, let’s understand client relationship management (CRM) and its importance, and then we’ll dive into some very useful tips.
What Is Client Relationship Management?
The interactions of a company with clients and their approach to building a positive working relationship are referred to as client relationship management. When you have a good system in place, you’ll be able to significantly generate ongoing business, client retention, and brand reputation.
You can incorporate data analysis which can help you big time to understand and improve the relationship with your clients, and then leverage CRM to increase the profits. CRM has a major impact on the goodwill of the company, which also determines the ability of the company to retain or gain new clients. You can break client relationship management into four distinct parts:
- Understand what your clients want from you
- Delivering those requirements with responses to additional queries
- Finding out what a client needs even before they know it
- Work of targeted interactions that highlights the client’s requirements
Benefits of Good Client Relationship
The benefits of maintaining a good client relationship go far beyond just running your business. It can help you in improving relationships with current customers, finding new ones, and retaining the ones you’ve worked with in the past. As we discussed above, it’s somewhat like a romantic relationship, you have to show that you care. There are many ways of doing it, one of which is sending personalized thank you cards for business, which will paint a positive image of yours in your client’s mind. Now let’s look into a small list of benefits you’ll get by maintaining a good client relationship.
Enhances Customer Service
The efforts you put in managing client relationships also improves the standard of customer service you provide. When you provide a personal touch to your clients, you get a broader perspective and treat them individually rather than as a group.
The system allows you to determine the standard of service you are going to provide based on the priority level of the client. This will make your company more understanding and responsive, and as you improve these, your client services quality will also skyrocket. This means that the instances of client agitation and frustration will reduce significantly.
Find New Clients
Finding new clients is always a challenging task for businesses. However, by implementing a CRM system, you can effectively help yourself in new client acquisition. With its help, you can keep a track of your existing client base, and determine who are the people or businesses that you should target.
When you are running a client acquisition campaign (a never-ending process), you need to be in touch with your prospective clients consistently. A good client relation system will ensure that you can do this without forgetting about any client.
Optimize Marketing Approach
By using client management software, you can easily understand the needs and behavior of your clients. This is beneficial as it allows your business to determine what is the correct time to introduce your product or new services to your clients. Client relationship management can also provide much-needed information to the sales team for tailoring the marketing approach.
When you follow an optimized and tailored marketing approach, you can save a decent sum of money by only targeting the clients who would be interested in working with you. This means that you would be able to utilize your resources in a much meaningful and efficient manner. For example, before sending a proposal, make sure that the client you are sending it to will be interested in considering it.
Some Tips to Manage Client Relationship
For businesses to succeed, management of client relationships is essential. It covers all the aspects of interactions that a business has with its clients, whether it’s related to sales or services. Here are some tips for you to be better at client relationship management.
Communication is Crucial
Whenever you’re doing business, efficient communication should always be a top priority of yours. This is something that often falls by the wayside when everyone in the team is focused to get the work done. You must take some time out to be clear and consistent with communication throughout the project.
However, difficult conversation with a single client should not come in between you and your productivity, nor should it affect your personal time. But if you’re always available for the client, it appears to them that you are truly concerned about their work. You can take communication a step further by ensuring that clients can be open and honest with you about their opinions.
Speak the Language of Your Client
Sticking to a tool where you feel most comfortable is not something that’ll boost your business heavily. One common factor between successful companies is that they can adapt easily to the style of their clients, formality, and preferred communication method. For example, if you prefer email to be a more convenient method of communication, but your clients are more used to video conferences, then switching to video conferencing will have a good impact on your relationship with them.
Address the Need of Client Proactively
Irrespective of your role in the relationship with your client, it is part of your job to be accountable for addressing their pain points and helping them in tackling the problems. There is a high chance that your clients will not be aware of their actual needs. They might be struggling with something that they have no idea about, but it’s your job as an expert to find those issues even before they do.
Moreover, once you have found any issue, reach out to the clients with a solution and without any hesitation. You can even conduct research on finding the issues that the client is not facing at present but might face in the future. This way, you can demonstrate your dedication and competence to your clients.
Treat Your Clients as an Individual
It is essential to maintain a healthy professional relationship with the client. But acknowledging that you see them as an individual can take your relationship to a different height altogether- it will be worth more than just a paycheck. However, the extent to which you can carry this personal-professional relationship depends completely on your industry and your client’s personality.
If you know that your client is a middle-aged parent, you can ask them how their kids are doing. For clients who value emotions in the business, you can consider sending letters or thank you cards, which will also help in creating a positive image of you. For some clients, you can even consider sending news in emails about their favorite field, celebrity, or sports.
Wrapping It Up
A good customer-client relationship requires significant time and effort from both sides. If you wish to see your business succeed, managing client relationships is a non-negotiable aspect. We have seen above how beneficial this relationship can be for both parties. Moreover, you can follow the above-mentioned tips to manage it correctly and bring the best out of you and your clients.