Relationship Marketing Is The Key To Growth

What’s your most significant issue in selling your products or services? Market positioning? What to say? Collateral? Bad product/service? Too many potential customers (don’t we wish)?

For most businesses – it’s not any of those but simply a lack of interested prospects to engage in the proposal and acquisition process.

In this business blog post is a story about growing your business sales with relationship marketing. However, before we get to it, we use an analogy of a woodpile – (yes, you have read it correctly) to describe why relationship marketing is key to keeping a healthy sales pipeline.  Sit back and get into the story!

Storytime

The value of the outside woodpile

My wife, Diane, and I and our three kids spent 10 years in New England before moving to Denver. We bought a home with a woodland and were told it needed thinning to grow strong.

The romantic in me saw how fulfilling it would be to go back to the earth, and this woodland management problem seemed the perfect opportunity. I told a neighbor of my plan to use the wood to heat my house the next winter and even my hot water year-round. It was June when I started. He laughed, then explained that I needed to go buy some firewood because the green wood I was felling wouldn’t be dry enough to burn for another year. Undaunted I called and had dry wood delivered in 16 foot logs, cut, chopped, and stacked them outside.

It was a great system until the outside woodpile was depleted some time in early February. Fortunately, the oil boiler I never intended to use again kicked on and got us through the winter.

We learned a valuable lesson. A hot fire was not the key to heating the house, and neither was a full load of wood in the inside woodpile. And how many trees there were in the woods was completely unhelpful. The only thing that mattered was if we had enough wood in the outside woodpile to get us through a full winter. The outside woodpile was everything. We paid much more attention to the size of the outside woodpile in the years that followed.

The outside woodpile is key to growth too

I have discovered that business development in marketing support services shares the same requirement – the outside woodpile is everything.

My New England experience translates to business pretty well. My woods is my target market, my outside woodpile is potential customers with real names and phone numbers with whom I have easy access (they’ll take my call), and my inside woodpile is those potential customers actively talking to me about my services. My fire/boiler are those with whom the pricing and proposal process is complete – the only thing left is for us to get a yes or no decision.

A friend of mine, Art Radtke, helped me see clearly why the key to successful growth is the outside woodpile.

A big outside woodpile equals a lot of clients

Where does the sales process break down for most of us? If we had a steady stream of potential customers who need what we have and are interested in possibly buying it, how would that impact our sales? If all you have to do is call the next person on the list and begin a buying conversation, would business growth be an issue? It’s not a far-fetched idea but a practical way to grow our business that most of us miss. And it’s the only way to even out the peaks and valleys we experience in the sales cycle.

Ask a business owner how the business is going, and you might get, “Great, we have a lot of customers right now” (or the reverse). Translation – “Our ash pile is full of existing customers we closed in previous years. I really don’t have anything in the boiler (yes/no status).

My inside woodpile (proposals) isn’t full, because I don’t have an outside woodpile (relationships with potential customers).” If we don’t have clients, we’re out in the forest (mixers), madly chopping down trees (building new relationships) and hoping they’ll dry fast so we can burn them up.

Drying the wood equals building the relationships

What we don’t understand is the drying process in the outside woodpile – the process of developing relationships of trust on the way to acquiring clients. It’s the key to consistent and predictable growth.

Mort Murphy, another friend, says there are four major ways to focus on customer acquisition – Advertising, Public Relations, Direct Marketing (including cold calls), and Relationship Marketing. In all my conversations with business owners and sales VPs about how they obtained most of their customers, the 80/20 rule always kicks in. 80% or more (usually more) of their business comes from existing relationships, and 20% or less (usually well less) comes from advertising, PR, direct marketing, or other non-relational forms.

Relationships are clearly the key for us – relationships fill up the outside woodpile with people who need what we have to offer and want to talk to us because they trust us. And these relationships, referrals, or migratory relationships (moving from one company to another) is the key to our growth. Ironically, most of us have budgets for advertising, PR, and direct marketing, which account for the smallest percentage of our sales, and no budget for building relationships! How many companies do you know with a line item for “Relationship Marketing”? Likely few if any.

Random Hope is not a good sales strategy, but too often, it’s our central unarticulated strategy. There is nothing wrong with advertising, PR, or direct marketing, but why do we put all our energy in these when all the evidence says we get our clients from existing clients, past clients who moved to another company, friends, referrals from friends or clients, and other relationships?

Relationship Marketing Strategy

Suppose we want to even out the peaks and valleys of client acquisition and see consistent, predictable growth. In that case, we need an intentional, well-developed, written strategy for Relationship Marketing, including a significant budget to support it. For relationship marketing to succeed, you need referrers.

Referrers – raving fans and advocates

Define for your business what you would describe as Raving Fans and Advocates. For me, Raving Fans refer to me without asking, and Advocates are glad to help if I give them very specific directions. Make a list of your Raving Fans and Advocates.

Develop these relationships so Advocates become Raving Fans, and Raving Fans send you even more potential clients. The best way to do this is to become intimately acquainted with what will help them in their businesses and figure out how to help them get there. All businesses talk about and even believe in serving their Raving Fans, but few of us actually do it.

Make a list of people (not businesses! – people buy from people) who you would like to have as Advocates and Raving Fans.

Which of your existing clients are not already Advocates or Raving Fans?
What actions do you need to take to get them to become one?

Put marketing money into events that serve your Raving Fans, Advocates, clients, and potential clients (inside and outside woodpile).

Events

Don’t sell to them; serve them where they are, even if it has nothing to do with your business. People become our friends because they find that relating to us serves them. Why do we treat our business relationships differently? Recreation such as golf, wine tastings, cooking classes, education on business principles, co-sponsoring of charity events – the list can be endless of things you can do to develop relationships that will lead to more sales.

Strategic Alliances

What other business owner is chasing the same customer base as you but isn’t competing with your company? These are just about the best source of new clients. You could rain on each other for years to come. Build these relationships!

Follow up

Events or meetings are only the beginning. How many trade show booths and/or wine socials have you sponsored where follow-up wasn’t done well? And how many of these were well-planned to develop your intended relationships vs. a company-sponsored “mixer” for all conference attendees?

Summing Up

The key to successful Relationship Marketing is an outside woodpile full of people who know you. This moves you away from “contacts” to “connections” and creates a much higher close rate.

Make Relationship Marketing a central part of your marketing strategy and budget.

Shooting a gun in the woods is not bear hunting, and throwing money at advertising, PR, direct marketing, or even Relationship Marketing is not a marketing and sales strategy.

Identify the relationships feeding you business and the ones you wish were, and focus deeply and intentionally on serving them in their businesses. This will make them want to refer to you and help you build your outside woodpile.