Is it possible to build a business based solely on relationships?
In our opinion, the answer is yes, but. . . People-to-people relationships are the foundation of many successful business ventures, and in small businesses they play a particularly important role. On the one hand, they allow to build a strong bond and organizational culture, so that there is no great distance between employees or employees and their superiors. However, when looking at the organization and its relationships with business partners – suppliers and customers, this “but. . . ” appears.
What is it dependent on? It seems to me that the key issue is whether our customers should be individual customers or business customers. Another is for which segment of customers we offer our products. High-margin products that we sell a few per year can rely entirely on good relationships with potential customers. When we are targeting the basic goods market, this type of approach would not be successful. But how many of these relationships are we actually able to cultivate and effectively maintain? This problem was studied by British psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar. In his 2016 paper Calling Dunbar’s numbers, Social Networks, he created the concept of the Dunbar number, or the maximum number of relationships that a socially active person can maintain. For some, 150 seems like a huge number of relationships, for others, especially people who have active profiles on social media, it’s not enough. So much, practically can be maintained, including people friendly to us, whom we loosely know. So what does the use of relationships look like in building long-term business success and why do networking organizations do so well these days? The answer to this question is relatively simple. A business built on valuable relationships is not about our circle of relationships and acquaintances, but about our friends and their circle of business.
What makes a good CRM? Will it help you build relationships with other people?
Definitely yes. CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a tool that enables customer relationship management, helping companies to create and maintain strong relationships.
With CRM, companies can collect and analyze customer data, allowing them to better understand their needs and preferences. For example, the CRM system in Maconoma ERP can remind us of the upcoming birthday of one of our most important contractors and remind us of his interests, which will allow us to better match a small gift with which we will not only convey that we remember, but also that he is not indifferent to us. A good CRM in the legal industry will allow us to easily determine the profitability of clients and help with the learning, which has made this company devote more of its budget to legal aid and another company from a similar industry and of a similar size entrusts us with much less work. Engineering companies can use CRM to manage relationships with key stakeholders in their projects. Easily accessible information about the project manager’s interests on the client’s side and what he pays special attention to will be key in long-term cooperation. This information should not only be held by the construction manager or the project manager on our side, because such a person may leave us. In this way, we preserve knowledge within the organization.
A good CRM is not just a tool for managing relationships. It provides data to analyze the direction in which the company is to develop, determine the value of relationships with our business partners and train new employees. It is a versatile tool and, like our relationships, often not fully used or simply wrong.
Let’s talk about what data you collect and how you use it. What have your relationships with your customers taught you so far?
