Building strong business relationships is vital to the success of your business. Here’s how to become the person your customers or partners can’t do without.
We all have business relationships that are vital to our professional success. In our experience, we succeed with our clients when we hear and understand them. As advisors and thought partners, we have found that gaining buy-in to our ideas is as much about listening and reacting to our clients as it is about selling. Many people will really open up to a good listener.
But it takes work. How do you improve your listening skills? Here are five approaches that have worked well for us:
1. Give your client the benefit of the doubt.
People reason and prioritise the way they do based on the sum total of their life experiences. Even when we believe they are wrong, we have to respect that they came by their point of view honestly. Only in rare cases have we concluded that a person is simply a bad actor with perverse motivations. At least 99 percent of businesspeople we have encountered are good, moral, reasonable people. If you agree, then your role is not to judge or condemn or write off a person, but work to understand where you disagree on facts, conclusions, priorities and incentives.
…to read this article in full, visit leading US small business resource, Inc.