Whether you’re a tradie working out on site or a small business owner toiling away in store, relationships matter. In a competitive market, it’s not just about skills, products and prices; trust, reliability, and communication can be what set you apart.
Building stronger business relationships helps to create loyalty toward your business and encourages customers to return over and over again. And the good news is you don’t need to transform into a talkative extrovert or learn the names and ages of all your clients’ children to reap the benefits. Once you’ve found customers for your business, the next step is to retain their custom. One of the best ways to do that is by building good relationships with them. Forging stronger relationships builds loyalty and goodwill, increasing the value of your business. These connections also help you attract new customers through word of mouth and act as a buffer during challenging times.
“People do business with people, not necessarily with businesses,” explains business coach Donna Stone. “It’s about knowing and trusting you. If someone knows you and likes you and trusts you, they’re more likely to do business with you or refer you to others and keep that relationship going.”
It’s equally important to nurture relationships with suppliers, sales reps, accountants, service providers and anyone else within the orbit of your business, explains Nicole Cox, cofounder of business consultancy Tradies in Business.
“If we don’t have strong relationships with these people, we’ve got nobody to fall back on when we need help,” she says. “Often, as a business owner, we find ourselves with a shortfall—we’ve forgotten to order something, and we need to get it somewhere in a rushed way. If we’ve got a relationship with someone, that opens the door to being supported in the business rather than having to go it alone.”
You might even develop relationships with other tradies and small business owners to whom you can refer clients for overflow work and for services your business doesn’t provide. “Sometimes your competitors can be really good business connections,” Stone says.
Building business relationships doesn’t need to involve asking personal questions or a lot of social chitchat if that’s not your thing. What matters is forging meaningful—and, dare we say, authentic—connections.
“You don’t need to be an extrovert or someone who has the gift of the gab. Quite often, good relationships are built by people who listen,” Stone says, explaining that simply asking about someone’s weekend and actively listening to their reply is an effective starting point.
Tradies in Business co-founder, Warrick Bidwell, says “making deposits into the other person’s ‘emotional bank account’”, as he likes put it, promotes connection and trust, transforming business transactions into relationships.
“Tell your client what’s going on with the job as most people want certainty. Or if a customer has been great at telling you what they want, tell them that. Say something nice to your customers or suppliers that makes them feel good,” he advises.
“You’ve made their day a little bit easier, or you’ve reduced their stress levels a little bit. That takes the transactional nature out of it.” Even something as simple as offering to buy a coffee builds relationships, Bidwell says. He says a tradie who called ahead of a meeting to ask if he’d like a latte became his tradie of choice “because he was thinking about me”.
Stone agrees that actions can indeed speak louder than words. “It’s about being personable and doing what you can to help,” she says. You might recommend your mechanic to someone onsite whose vehicle is playing up, stay open for an extra 10 minutes for a regular customer, or simply listen to a client’s concerns with genuine empathy.
It might sound counterintuitive, but digitising your business and using online platforms to streamline functions like sales and marketing can also help you to connect with clients and forge stronger relationships.
“These systems do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of communication because we’re creating a structured system that does it for us, instead of having to reinvent it every single time,” Cox says.
Plus, going digital provides a platform to educate clients about your business—what you do, how you work and when you’re available—which leads to fewer misunderstandings and stronger relationships.
“Not only are we educating our clients and helping set their expectations, but we’re also creating a better outcome for us as business owners because we’ve got educated clients who aren’t asking a bunch of questions. They know what our payment terms are. They know how we work,” Cox says.
Ultimately, Bidwell says, this builds mutual understanding and respect.
“A relationship with a customer is no different to a relationship with a family member or a spouse in that people want to feel heard, and they want to feel like their needs are being met.”
