The Importance of Relationships In Business

This past weekend, two of our team members spent their entire Saturday participating in an amazing event that benefits the children’s hospital and the cancer center in Madison where we have our main office. This was a reminder of how important and powerful relationships are in business.

While this seems like a “no brainer” to read, stop and think about all the jobs you’ve had – was building relationships always emphasized? Typically, when building relationships is not an emphasis, company culture suffers as does the long term vitality of the business. For a brand new business, without relationships you will be hard pressed to ever get things off the ground and even if you do, keep things going long term.

Here are four relationships that businesses must cultivate to achieve maximum potential: 

Relationships With Team Members

Everyone is busy. Stress comes with the territory when you are doing important work. Feeling connected is a constant risk these days as people are working remote more and more. But despite all these challenges and more, building relationships with team members is critical. In this article published last year, “little things” that make team members feel appreciated include:

• Communication
• Balanced Feedback
• Flexibility

Simple acts of respect and graditude go a long way in getting the best your team members have to give.

Relationships With Prospects

Building relationships takes as long as it takes so this can be tricky when you have a new company and you need to get business in the door yesterday. However, you will find the prospects who have the time to get to know, like, and trust your company become some of your strongest client relationships and often turn into long term partnerships. Here are effective ways we build relationships with prospects:

• Show up – Genuinely engage with people online or in person.
• Share what you know about what they need to know – This is the basis of our marketing philospohy and you can read more about that here.
• Root for them no matter what – You will win some and you will lose some in your business. Every prospect who doesn’t become a client is a potential friend, referral partner and/or a potential prospect again in the future.

Relationships With Clients

The quality of your client relationships determines if you jump out of bed to get back to work every morning or not. It’s either: “Ooo, what’s next!” or it’s: “Ugh, what now.”.

When you “do” prospect relationships well, you typcially “do” client relationships well too. If your client philosophy is partnership, then clients are much like team members in your world and communication, balanced feedback, and flexibility is important the same way it is when working with your internal team.

Relationships With Partners

Partnerships are the most overlooked potential relationship in business. Partners can be people who help you, people who refer you, people who take on opportunities you can’t and also refer opportunities to you that they can’t service. Everyone is a potential Partner – so proceed accordingly!

We all know that “business is about relationships”. But there are enough businesses in this world devoid of relationships so knowing and doing are not always the same thing. Building relationships in business takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, but it’s time and energy well spent in the end.