Good relationships have several key foundations, including open communication and trust. Open communication is really about two-way communication. It’s not only sharing with your customers what your plans for the future are, so that you’re building a common ground, but it’s also about listening to your customers. If you start by listening to what their needs are, what their concerns are, what their plans are, you’ll be in a better position to support your customer going forward. If you communicate with your customers about what your plans are, they’ll feel better about the relationship. It’s that open communication that builds trust over time, and when there’s trust, then your customer will feel comfortable about staying in a relationship with you. You’ll feel comfortable sharing your true needs and not just negotiating. A solid long-term relationship requires ongoing dialogue. You can never have a relationship with a person if you don’t even talk to them. To look at it from a more personal perspective, your best friends are people you can trust, and how did you build that trust? You built it over time, through interactions, through listening, through sharing, and you had to share personal things about your future, and they shared things that you listened to. That combination of two-way communication and an open environment builds trust, builds relationships. The stronger the relationship, the better chance you have of having the right products and services going forward, and the better chance you have of keeping those customers happy.

One of the key starting points in building a successful long-term services relationship is recognizing that it’s an ongoing relationship. It’s not a one-time sale of a product. It’s not “let’s call up every time we need to get some money from our customer.” It’s a relationship, and a relationship is about listening and communicating, and not just communicating about money. Most companies today focus on their service relationships in two ways. One is when someone calls for support, and they answer the phone, and the other is when it’s time to get money, and they make a phone call. If you had a relationship where the only time you spoke with the person was when you called them, or when they needed something from you, that’s not going to build a great relationship. Those aren’t your best friends. You want someone who calls you to build the relationship when it’s not about something they need.

How do you do that? At Rainmaker, we do a couple of things to help companies manage their service relationships. The first is to tell them, “Go and communicate with your customer and find out what they’re thinking at a time when you’re not asking for money.” So if you’ve got a year-long service contract, maybe at the six-month point you send out a survey. This is something that we do with many of the service contracts that we manage for companies. We learn a couple of things. We uncover any problems that the customer may have. The advantage of that is that if we uncover an unsatisfied customer – and they do exist from time to time, for whatever reason – we’re then able to help solve that customer’s problems. And if the customer is taken care of then, when we ask them for money later to renew their service agreement, all they remember is the positive experience. If we didn’t know they were unhappy, however small the unhappiness was, when we contacted them three or four months later to ask them for money for their service contract for the following year, and then they told us they were unhappy and then we resolved it, the chances of them renewing are much lower. The reason for that is the customer’s perception. In the first example, the customer says, “You took care of me. I had a great experience. Now you’re asking for money; of course I’m going to renew.” In the second example, they say, “You took care of me, but you only took care of me when you wanted something from me.” Again, it’s a subtle change in the relationship, but that’s the kind of difference between a great customer relationship and a relationship with a customer who is buying your services just because they have to.

Now, there’s a second benefit to proactively going to your customers during the course of their service agreement when they haven’t called you. In most companies today, there’s turnover. And turnover occurs in two ways: people change companies and people change roles in a company. So the same person may be there, but they may have a different responsibility. Often, a new person coming into a job doesn’t have all the transition information they would like. A new person coming into a job may not even know they have a service agreement. So a person comes into a job; six months later they get a call from a company saying,

“We’re here to renew your service agreement.” The person didn’t know they had a service agreement. They’ve lived without it for six months because they didn’t know they had it, so they found some other way to keep their systems running. They aren’t likely to want to pay for it next year because they lived just fine without it. But if you found that person and made sure they knew they had that service agreement six months earlier, they might have taken advantage of it, or at least known it was there as a security blanket and not found a way to solve potential service issues, so when you ask for the money again, you’re more likely to get it. So to deal with high turnover rates, proactively going to those responsible for a service agreement at the mid-point of the year or at some other time during the length of the contract helps you uncover the people who don’t know they have a service agreement.

A business-to-business relationship is still a relationship. There are people involved. The fact that you think you’re communicating with a company doesn’t change anything – if that person is either not there or not listening, one-way communication is not going to produce any results. In today’s world, where e-mail and one-to-one communications can be managed efficiently with the right systems, you have the opportunity to do this for all your customers – your large customers in person, and your medium and small customers electronically – and stay in touch with those people who manage the relationship with you and understand their changing needs.

One of the important things to keep in mind in a business-to-business relationship is that communication needs to be about finding the right people at the right time with the right messages. And you have to have all three of those. It’s not just a single person, usually, when you’re dealing with a business-to-business relationship. And in complex service agreements and in other longer-term important high-value relationships, it’s not about a single communication or a single medium. In an ongoing relationship, it’s not just one message. The messages have to change and vary and be the right ones at the right time, so they can get that two-way open communication and trust. If you keep in mind the right people, the right messages, and the right timing, you’re going to have effective, open, two-way communication, and that’s the key to an ongoing relationship.

I think the key to being proactive in a relationship is that most customers today expect lousy service. They expect that they’re going to buy something from you and they’ll never hear from you again until you want more money from them. That’s the expectation, so they’re not going to call you just to build the relationship. It’s up to the company to be proactive and build that relationship, and show that they see value in the ongoing relationship – not just the short-term revenue.

The second part is just reacting and listening – whether it’s listening to your customer’s preference for media (what kind of communication they want, and would they prefer to hear from you by letter or by e-mail), what kinds of services or products they are interested in, what’s their experiences with the support offerings, and so on – so that you can improve not only the relationship but your service offerings going forward.

A rich, happy personal life is based on having strong, trusting personal relationships. In the business environment, a rich, profitable company also has multiple strong, open, trusting relationships with its customers. It’s not enough to say you love your customers. It’s about communicating and listening, consistently, as a core element of your business operations