Relationship Marketing

 A few decades back, when Sarah and I set up our own company, I read a book by Regis McKenna called "Relationship Marketing". It's no longer in print and I don't still have a copy but its basic message remains with me and was quite simple: business is built on relationships - real, genuine, sincere relationships. It isn't always true, of course: some businesses have to be based on the standard "price, performance" calculation and some are based on other factors - but the route we chose, and that worked for us and for our customers, was relationships.

Our business was then - and is now, though in a slightly different but related (!) field - a niche, and a highly technical one: people needed to talk, and to trust, and what we were selling wasn't a simple commodity in a well-supplied and established market. Not everybody needed what we were offering - in fact most people either didn't or didn't know they did - so in those days even though I adopted the then novel technique of 'cold calling' I knew most people would say 'no'. What Regis McKenna said was that you didn't have to get to 'yes' on every call - in fact you shouldn't reasonably expect to - instead you should hope to initiate a relationship that might in time lead to that contact, or a contact of theirs, wanting to talk. It was the opposite of what I was taught in telephone sales training: the conventional approach, then as now, was to bulldoze through the call or the meeting with your own desired outcomes in mind as the only acceptable target. But building relationships was more fun, and luckily turned out to be more productive.

At the risk of cultural stereotyping, later in my career I had the pleasure of working in Japan with Texan partners. Contacts and meetings with Japanese clients were often interminable and apparently unproductive: talking about backgrounds, sport, families, and no visible progress towards the actual aim of doing business. But what those clients were doing was assessing us - sizing us up, judging if they wanted to form a business relationship, before getting down to the nitty gritty of what that business might entail. I witnessed with awe sometimes my Texan colleagues driving the agenda - what are our desired outcomes from this meeting, what are our detailed business agenda items, what are our likely business dealings, when can we expect a decision - and I swear I could see my Japanese clients' eyes glaze and their smiles fix in a rigid politeness that signalled the end of any business prospect. What those clients wanted was a relationship first: in fact second, first being to judge whether a relationship might work and be valued. It is cultural stereotyping because not only Japanese work like that, and not all Japanese do: it's a style, a way of doing business, that works in some circumstances and with some people in some sectors - and when it does, if you enjoy it then it is a genuine joy as well as a powerful way to build lasting business relationships.

Interestingly you can't easily fake it: a real relationship has to be built sincerely - you have to be genuine - and so in a way you can't learn it in the way you can learn the steps in a sales call to 'win the business'.

I'm reminded of this now as I step back from leading the company: first because I see relationships still being at the heart of the way we do business; but second, because I note how many of our clients and partners remain real friends and lasting relationships that endure way beyond our business dealings.

Relationship Marketing: it's worth a try.