Business Monday: The Single Best Piece of Business Advice – Bob Salvas

-by Bob Salvas, contributing writer

It was 2003 when I started my first business venture.  Honestly, it was even more challenging than I expected (and I expected it to be very challenging!).  I especially struggled with having to constantly look for new customers.  This took a lot of the wind out of my sails (and out of my sales!).  Finally, out of desperation, I asked someone who I looked up to in my industry for some advice.

He asked me what I was doing on a regular basis to grow my business.  I said I was making lots of cold calls, sending out mass emails, and even doing some networking.  Then came some very specific questions that I answered with a resounding “NO” to in each case:

“Do you like receiving cold calls at your home or office?”

“Do you like getting way too many emails from people you do not know?”

“Do you like going to networking events and meeting people who just want to sell you?”

He continued, “If you don’t like being on the receiving end of those things, why on earth would you want to push those things onto other people?” I argued that this was business, not personal.  To which he said the single best piece of business advice I have probably ever received:

There is no such thing as business relationships—-they are all just RELATIONSHIPS.

I had been going about it all wrong.  My individual efforts were focused on trying to find transactional customers but, especially as a consultant, I needed relational customers.  Customers who I had a trusted relationship with.  To find them, I needed to develop a trusted relationship with everyone I already knew.  By earning the trust of those I knew, I would put myself in a position to get more referrals to the kind of customers I was looking for.   I needed to be more like a farmer than a hunter.  So, I began to plant the seeds of success in 3 areas:

 AUTHENTICITY – You can’t create a strong relationship with someone if you are pretending to be something you are not (and people will pick up on that disconnect quite quickly).  I was pretending to be a businessperson doing businessperson things (like making cold calls) but that was not who I really was.  I stopped making cold calls and instead worked on improving my genuine, honest relationships with the people I already knew.

“The truth is you can’t have an authentic relationship with anyone else until you have one with yourself.” –Barb Betts

GIVING – It is not reasonable to expect people (especially people you have just met) to give you referrals out of the blue.  They need to know, like, and trust you first.  You can bolster that by giving those people what they want or need.  So, I stopped asking for business (especially at networking events or when meeting someone for the first time) and instead, I started asking what I could do for them.  I made it my mission to help people anyway I could.  Most importantly, I was giving freely and without expectations of getting back anything in return.

“When you base your relationships — in business or anywhere else in your life— on who owes who what, that’s not being a friend. That’s being a creditor.” -Bob Burg

COMMUNICATING – It is also not realistic to think that people will remember you after one or two meetings.  Relationships take time and frequency of attention to grow (just like plants do).  I learned that communicating with people (face-to-face) is the best and fastest way to build trust.  So, I attended more networking events and trade shows than I had before and made sure I was doing proper follow-up.  Of course, in-person is not always an option, so I consistently reached out with positive, valued messages by a variety of means (phone, email, text, social media, thank you cards, etc.) to stay top-of-mind with all the people I knew, especially those that I did not see in person all that often.

“Relationships are determined by the quantity AND quality of communication.” – Jim Cecil

It took a little bit of time, but by focusing on developing real relationships with real people, I was eventually able to greatly increase the number of referrals I was getting.  That, in turn, led to even more business (referrals are easier to convert into business than other prospecting leads) which in turn led to more success than I had ever hoped for when I first started the business.  Farming, it turns out, is way BETTER than hunting!                                                                         ________________________________

Bob Salvas is a Professional Development Manager for the RI Builders Assn (ribuilders.org), a marketing consultant, the co-founder of Brew Work Networking (brewwork.org), and the co-founder of THE MARKETING CAMP (themarketingcamp.com). Bob can be reached at 401-359-1602 or at [email protected].