Relationship Marketing and Your Computer Consulting Business
Relationships are at the core of business success. Persuasive relationships are where marketing and advertising come together in sales. Marketing initiatives for your computer consulting business focus on building and maintaining relationships with clients to increase customer loyalty, expand customer reach and generate more revenue opportunities.
In this blog post, we will explore relationship marketing as it relates to you and your computer consulting business.
The purpose of this article is not to teach you how to become a relationship marketing expert. You already know tons of stuff about your business. This article will help you harness your existing knowledge and put it in a strategic context.
A Relationship Marketing Plan for Your Computer Consultant Business:
Planning and implementation of relationship marketing begins with the recognition that there are three components to your business: employee, client and employer relationship capital. Each of these ingredients is both necessary and special; which means each is dependent on the others to be effective. This article will discuss each one individually and provide actionable steps for achieving success in each one respectively.
1. Employee Relationship Capital:
The people in your business are the heart and soul of your computer consulting business. Although it does not happen often, it is important to remember that you are not a one-person company. Your employees need to feel appreciated and appreciated for their contributions to the success of the business. Their success will be determined by how they feel and what they believe about themselves as well as their employer. The good news is that employees are more than qualified to get involved in relationship marketing initiatives with clients and other customers and prospects. Have them "sell" your products, services and you with an eye toward customers' needs, wants or desires. Your employees will be the ones providing the hands-on experience that customers are likely to perceive as valuable.
This relationship capital is not only important to your computer consulting business, but also to your employees. You need their input if you want your business to stay competitive and grow into something bigger. It is also imperative that you keep employee relationships as clean and honest as possible because any misuse of this capital can result in bad feelings between employees and employer.
2. Client Relationship Capital:
Many computer consultants have found themselves in positions where they feel like what they do for a living is more about "work" than anything else. In some ways, this is true. They are a "service" business that provides technical services to other businesses and individuals. But, if you think about it, their work is very similar to what teachers do for students or what lawyers do for clients. This means that the same principles of relationship marketing can be applied here as well.
The client relationship capital is the foundation of everything you do as a computer consultant. You need to spend time with your clients to understand how they use technology and why. Spend time with them listening so you are better able to help them solve their problems. Gain their trust and become one of their trusted advisors instead of just selling an on premise or cloud computing product or service to them.
3. Employer Relationship Capital:
When you hire employees and set them up to follow a sales process, they become your clients as well. Depending on your model of operation, you may or may not be involved in the actual sale of these products or services. Regardless, the end result is that your employees are the people who generate and support business for your company – whether you like it or not!
How can you make sure that this capital investments in your employees honor their responsibilities to create value for customers? Ask yourself if there are any resources that could be used to help their clients better understand technology. If there are opportunities for additional training, encourage them to get it done. If your business does not have any formal reporting structure or management tools, then maybe it is time for you to put something in place to get this capital working for you.
Relationship Marketing: Leveraging Employee, Client and Employer Relationship Capital to Build Your Computer Consulting Business
Now that you have a solid understanding of the three types of capital that make up your computer consulting business, let's review a few relationship marketing strategies that can help you leverage all three together. Remember that all of these marketing strategies and initiatives are targeted at generating more clients. This may seem counter-intuitive because when you talk about relationship marketing, most people immediately think about how to generate more referrals from existing clients. That is a very important benefit of relationship marketing and it should not be overlooked. But, when you are developing your relationship marketing efforts and strategies, you want to focus on reaching new customers because that gets you more business.
1. Employee Relationship Marketing:
The first thing we need to do is develop an employee relationship marketing plan and train employees on customer service best practices exclusive of technology products or services. The purpose of this plan is to create a culture of customer service excellence where employees are accountable for providing the same exceptional level of customer service to every customer, big or small – regardless of the type of business relationship between them.
This training and plan should be proactive, not reactive. That means that your employees will be responsible for generating the sales process from start to finish without any further assistance from you. The goal is to give employees specific information about how customers relate to technology and how it relates specifically to your business. If you are successful at doing this, you will create a customer service culture in your company where employees feel valued and appreciated for their efforts in customer service.
2. Client Relationship Marketing:
Develop a client relationship marketing plan that includes specific product or service goals tied directly to metrics that can quantify the impact of their efforts on the bottom line of your business. This plan should take into account two things:
3. Employer Relationship Marketing:
Develop a strategic employer relationship marketing plan that includes a clear positioning statement and a purpose statement. Develop a sales process that does not include any additional technology products or services. From this sales process point of view, you want to reinforce what your employees are doing for customers and put every dollar that they spend into the account where it can be seen as an investment in client relationships.
3. Customer Relationship Marketing:
If you can implement the three strategies covered in this article, then your company will have all the relational capital that it needs to succeed as a computer consulting business.
You can find additional resources for starting, managing or growing your computer consulting business at the Technology Entrepreneur Center website. And, if you are interested in learning more about relationship marketing for entrepreneurs, I have developed a comprehensive relationship marketing training system where I teach entrepreneurs how to leverage their relationships to get more customers and grow their businesses. You can learn more by visiting RelationshipMarketing.com now.
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"Now that you have a solid understanding of the three types of capital that make up your computer consulting business, let’s review a few relationship marketing strategies that can help you leverage all three together. Remember that all of these marketing strategies and initiatives are targeted at generating more clients.