What is Relationship Marketing?

Relationship marketing is the process of building business by nurturing existing relationships and turning clients into "Raving Fans."  Not only will these referral sources continue to hire you, they will highly recommend you to others.  You can also continually mine their resources to develop warm leads and tangential opportunities.

Who Is Responsible For Relationship Marketing?

The short answer is that everyone is responsible for marketing, from the receptionist to the CEO.  Granted, everyone has differing responsibilities, but it is important to create a culture within your firm that promotes the fact that everyone is responsible for marketing.

• Administrative personnel should be responsible for assuring that all of their interactions with both clients and vendors are always handled in a pleasant and respectful way...even when dealing with people and companies that work for you (vendors, consultants, etc.).  No matter how much someone upsets you, keep your cool and maintain the relationship.  Administrative personnel should not find themselves in the position of risking a relationship with a client or a vendor.
  
  
• Staff employees, as they are working on projects for their clients, should be responsible for assuring that all of their interactions with their client counterparts (client peers) help build strong relationships.  First, do a good job.  Second, get to know your client peer.  Even if you are not an executive, start building your networking skills now.
   
• Senior personnel have a more critical role in relationship marketing. Not only do they have to assure that their clients receive a good service and a good product (fulfilling the technical requirements of their jobs), they have to take an active role in relationship marketing.  This means getting to know your client on a more personal level and also farming additional leads out of your clients.  Get out of your technical skin and get personal.
   
• Executives, principals, and marketing staff are in the position of having to do both relationship marketing and hard core business development (developing new leads from relatively cold sources).  However, if you have trained your senior personnel to effectively manage your existing client relationships, you are ahead of the game.  If not, stop now and get your senior personnel involved.  Why?  Because if they are successfully handling existing client relationships, principal level staff members can focus on the most difficult and time consuming marketing function...business development.  Business development is not for the faint of heart.

Where to Start

Make a Cultural Paradigm Shift.  First, the leaders of your company need to make a cultural paradigm shift and establish that relationship marketing is paramount to the success of your business.  Bellow this message from the highest levels of your organization so that it is clear that marketing is everyone's job.  Then backup the message with expectations, policy, and monitoring.

Divide and Conquer.  Take your current client list and divide it up amongst your senior staff and principals.  Establishing "ownership" of a client is an important step.  Make staff members responsible for specific clients and work with them to prioritize the clients.  Each client owner should be responsible for the well being of their clients.  Have them keep good notes and listen to the things their clients say.  They can learn a lot about their client's interests, which will be valuable to the relationship building process.

Organize Your Contacts in a Database.  Yes, technology is an important aspect of relationship marketing.  Your company needs a central location to keep all of your contact information.  Programs such as Outlook, Goldmine, and Act are excellent client information databases.  There is also a new online contact management system called Salesforce.com which provides an excellent way for companies with multiple locations to centralize their databases on the web.

I would suggest that your company not take on the burden of building a custom database, there are too many good products in the marketplace.

Don't Overwhelm Yourself.  When you begin to engage in relationship marketing, do not overwhelm yourself.  Be realistic.  Here are some thoughts:

• Staff level employees should build a list of 5 client peers that they keep in touch with.  They should even be given a minimal budget to take their peers to lunch or other events.  Remember, you are growing your future senior staff members.  This should be a required part of their mentoring program.  Teach them early and your company will benefit.
   
• Senior staff members (your project managers and technical staff) should try to keep a list of 10-20 clients that they keep in regular contact with.  If your senior staff scheduled one lunch or event a month and maintained a consistent relationship with 12 clients, you would be ahead of the game.
   
• Principal staff members and marketing staff have a slightly different routine because they are in the business of farming new business contacts.  An easy rule of thumb is to keep 10 active contacts on your list at any one time and be persistent.  See "Appointment Setting and Growing Trees".

Get Off the Technical and Onto the Personal.  Your clients have plenty of time to hear you talk about your products and services.  Keep in mind that your technical performance or product performance is only half of the game.  In the service industry, personality and the ability to "connect" with your client on a personal level is the other half.  Know your client, adapt to that person, be comfortable, and make them comfortable.

Self-Confidence, Not Arrogance.  Your clients want to see you as a self-confident person.  One who takes pride in their work, is successful, and dependable.  When you are trying to develop a lasting relationship, there is nothing that will turn off a client faster than unchecked arrogance.  Keep it in check and display a bit of humility.

Persistence and Regularity.  Regardless of whether you are maintaining existing client relationships or developing new ones, the two keys to success are persistence and regularity:

• Persistence.  Making contact with people is not an easy task.  You have to be persistent.  If you have left a message and they don't return it after a few days...call them back.
   
• Regularity.  If you have a set number of clients you have been tasked to maintain, set up a regular contact schedule for those contacts and follow through.

How to Repair Damaged Relationships.  It actually is not as hard as you think because if you have mastered the art of keeping in touch with your clients by being persistent and regular, then repairing damaged relationships requires only one additional skill: humility.  After a relationship has gone bad (or if a relationship is going bad), try this:

• Finish the task you have started for the client.  However painful it may be...correct the wrong.
   
• Give the relationship a short breathing period.  Let your client catch his breath.
   
• Break the ice, humbly.  THE most important element to repairing a damaged relationship is taking responsibility for the problems you created.  Admitting to your client that you made mistakes will go a long way.  Also, don't forget to ask your client what you could have done differently.  Finally, if you think your client made mistakes, let him tell you what they were.  Pointing them out at the ice breaking phase will get you nowhere fast.