Besides all the attention required for developing cutting-edge negotiation training techniques and unbeatable sales strategies, building better business relationships isn’t as complicated and mysterious as everyone perceives it. Instead, there are a few tricks to building business relationships. After all, those traits that serve you best in life will probably serve you best in business. These are some of the ways to build healthy business relationships.
Know Your Value Proposition
Everything often falls in place when a company has a unique offering and devotes to creating real value. With a value proposition, it becomes easier even for a small brand to get noticed in the industry. Your brand doesn’t have to inflate its importance if it is bringing value to the target audience.
Set a Positive Tone
Of course, business relationships are a reflection of the personality of a company’s management team. As such, companies have to be candid, open, and fair with their stakeholders. Positive leadership attributes are the only traits that can help ingrain these values in an enterprise. Setting a positive tone will create an opportunity for these values to take root within the sales team and business development.
Embrace Your Personality
People often like portraying a sales-oriented persona that is different from who they are. Experts recommend entrepreneurs to try to work within the context of their personality as this makes them more productive and relatable to others. No matter how traits inherent in your personality are, never be afraid to embrace them.
Open Communication
The next step after establishing the terms of your business is to keep the lines of communication transparent. Your business partners should be able to get through to you via a call or email if anything goes haywire. One way to diffuse conflicts is to maintain human contact. It is hard for a business owner to solve problems and be frank in any relationship when communicating with suppliers and customers through intermediaries.
Manage Expectations
Investors should be open with their partners about what the best scenarios are and work together to find ways in which business realities can match up. By doing so, investors are setting their expectations as well as those of their partners at a manageable level. You better get pleasant surprises than frustrating disappointments.
Be Humble
Humility in the business world always trumps arrogance. Of course, every business associate will appreciate being treated with honesty and openness. Showing other partners humility is about being genuine, respectful, and upfront. Being humble is an attribute that can win an entrepreneur a lot of points in the long run.
Find Gain for Everyone
Of course, a good business relationship should benefit all parties. Successful business relationships often get dented when one party realizes that the deal will eventually end up being skewed toward the other side. However, the fairest relationships are always the ones that will net equal values for both parties.
Turn Mistakes into Opportunities
Correcting missteps and admitting blunders can go a long way in building business relationships. Your partners want to know that you are sorry and willing to correct failures and get back on the track. For example, your customer service team should respond to a mistake that resulted in delayed delivery of services with an apology and proposal to get everything fixed as soon as possible. However, for a blunder that is more than a minor setback, consider providing value to the wronged party or fix it right away.
Listen More than You Talk
Of course, everyone wants to extol their virtues and strengths hoping to get more business and impress others. However, research has found that being a listener highlights the strengths and attributes of an entrepreneur better than being a talker. For example, a successful financial advisor must first take the time to listen to the clients before giving them recommendations. Being a listener often results in long-term business success and more referrals.
