Anybody who has worked with corporate as well as retail clients will tell you that dealing with the two categories are as different as night and day. On the positive side, corporate clients are less sensitive to price and do not tend to switch between competing products or services a lot. On the flip side though, acquiring and maintaining a relationship with your corporate clientele takes a lot of effort. Sales cycles are often quite protracted and one wrong step during this process could set your relationship back by a long way.
There are however tried and tested strategies to stay in the good books of a corporate customer. Here are some tips to help you out.
Build A Personal Relationship
Given that engaging with corporate customers is a long-term game, it helps to build a personal relationship with the decision makers rather than simply maintaining a professional contact. Corporate customers know they bring a lot of money to the table and hence like to be pampered. Use the opportunity to build a personal relationship with the client by taking them out to lunches and essentially forging a bond. The saying ‘customer buys the salesperson, not the product‘ is true especially in the case of corporate sales.
Add Value To Their Business (Outside Of Your Offering)
The focus of your business should be to solve your customers’ problems and not simply make a sale. With this change in perspective, you stop restricting yourself to the value offered by your product or service and make a larger impact in the operations of your client’s business. For instance, if your business offers networking infrastructure to the client, you could also use the technology available with you to offer pro-bono security audits or help them handle technology during a conference they organize. Such acts not only help further the relationship as mentioned in the earlier point, but also makes your business irreplaceable. As a result, clients tend to fall back on your services more often and value their relationship with you as much as you value theirs.
Bring Together Your Clients Through Events
Does your clientele include businesses from various industries that would benefit from networking with one another? Corporate events are a great platform to not only showcase your reach and influence, but also help your clients enhance their networking with your other businesses (and thereby help their own growth objectives). There are a lot of factors that go into organizing a successful networking event, but the most important considerations are to ensure that attendees understand the purpose of the event and the value they can realize from it, a date and time that works for everyone and a platform where it is easy for attendees to interact and network with one another.
Don’t Be Pushy
While all the tips above should highly benefit your prospect or customer and thus help you win them over, do not overdo it. For instance, too many invitations to lunches can distract the customer from their daily routine and could push them away from you. Also, being too ready and helpful on activities outside your scope of business can sometimes lead to prospects taking advantage of your desperation to do business with them. This can sometimes lead to them unnecessarily stretching the sales cycle to continue taking advantage. The trick is to be helpful and valuable to the client without coming across as too eager or pushy. When this is done optimally, these tips help in building a great and lasting partnership between your business and your corporate clients.
