For B2B sellers, building meaningful customer relationships can be challenging. According to Harvard Business Review (HBR), building virtual relationships adds an additional challenge. In today’s increasingly virtual world, however, learning how to foster positive relationships over long distances is crucial.
The problem is that traditional sales tactics often don’t work when it comes to digital B2B selling. Modern B2B buyers typically only spend 17% of their time interacting with potential suppliers, and the rest is spent conducting research, meeting internally, or other similar activities. This means that touch points with customers need to be meaningful and impactful since they occur less frequently than before.
The good news is that there are several ways this can be accomplished. Teamraderie’s experiences, for example, can facilitate important conversations with stakeholders and make your interactions more meaningful.
The experiences are led by notable people and are highly-engaging and research-based. Overall, they’ve resulted in:
- 35% more executive engagement
- 50% more stakeholder engagement
- 20% higher pipeline win rate
Here’s an overview of nine ways to build impactful relationships with customers, as well as some specific strategies you can use to engage buyers virtually.
9 Ways to Build Meaningful Customer Relationships
According to insights gleaned from Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy’s book, “Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue,” there are several steps leaders can take to build meaningful relationships with their customers.
These steps include:
- Defining your customers
- Setting clear expectations
- Measuring your successes
- Taking purposeful action based on the data
- Personalizing the experience
- Proactively checking in with your customers
- Getting to know your customers personally
- Going above and beyond
- Prioritizing employee experience
Here’s an overview of each of these steps in more detail.
1. Clearly Define Your Customer
The first step to building a meaningful customer relationship is to understand them. Treating every customer the same way isn’t going to be effective, since everyone is different.
Make sure you begin your customer relationship by defining and understanding the following:
- Customer needs
- Pain points
- Goals
- Challenges
If you have existing relationships with customers, interacting with them can provide valuable insights into potential future buyers.
Hosting an experience through Teamraderie can open the door to these types of conversations. Teamraderie experiences are virtual or hybrid gatherings where you invite one or multiple customers in order to achieve a specific goal:
- Deepen relationships/trust with existing stakeholders
- Get to know new contacts
- Celebrate moments
- And more
Our snack journey around the world, for example, is a great way to connect with buyers and get to know them better. This will help you better define your ideal customer, and set up potential renewals for success.
2. Set Clear Expectations
Setting clear expectations is an important part of building a relationship with your customers, since it serves as the foundation for your connection with them. Upfront honesty increases feelings of trust and keeps you on the same page.
Make sure your customers understand the following:
- What they can expect from you
- What you need from them
- How you’re going to deliver value to them
By providing a clear roadmap, you can build feelings of connection through transparency, and continue to improve your relationship as you meet and exceed those expectations.
3. Measure Success
Quantitative data is a valuable tool for determining what’s going right, and what areas can be improved.
According to HBR, some of the metrics you should consider measuring include:
- Efficiency
- Speed
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer surveys
- Recurring revenue
- Churn rate
- Account health
These metrics include a combination of both internal and external factors. It’s important to make sure you’re continuously improving your internal processes, but it’s also crucial to track customer satisfaction.
4. Act on Data
Once you’ve collected the results of your quantitative analysis, it’s important to take actionable steps to improve your customer experience (CX), which is everything your company does to prioritize the customer and ensure their needs are met.
Use the data you collected to identify customers who are at risk of churning. Then take steps to intervene and prevent this churn.
For example, partnering with Teamraderie to facilitate an experience can help you deliver an impactful account touch in a short time. Our virtual ice cream experience can help you demonstrate appreciation in a unique way, providing a moment of joy in their day.
5. Personalize Your Interactions
In a study of B2B customers, the majority would gladly trade time for connection. In other words, they’d prefer connecting with humans over getting their problem solved quickly.
For this reason, it’s critical to make your CX as personalized as possible. Seek to understand your customers’ individual needs and preferences and facilitate opportunities to connect on an individual level.
Our virtual Tartine Bakery experience can help you connect with customers through a shared tasting experience. If you want an experience that focuses on goal-setting and planning, our “Sleigh Your Goals” experience—led by Olympian Simidele Adeagbo—is a great choice.
Each of our experiences is designed to improve connection and offer a unique means of interacting with customers in a personal, memorable, and impactful way.
6. Proactively Check In
Proactive customer service is becoming increasingly important to B2B buyers. For this reason, approximately 75% of organizations view it as extremely important to successful customer service, and 52% are increasing their budget to provide this level of proactive service.
Don’t wait for customers to come to you with problems. Instead, routinely check in with them to see how they’re doing and if there’s anything they need. Listening is a crucial skill here.
Teamraderie’s experiences create a structured way to engage with people at the account and can help you identify areas where you can be of assistance.
7. Get to Know Them Personally
Metrics like NPS and churn rate are important to track, and can provide valuable insights into your CX. However, quantitative data ultimately falls short when it comes to truly understanding your customers.
According to Gallup, becoming a trusted partner requires human-to-human interaction.
One of the best ways to personalize your CX is to get to know your customers personally. Forming this kind of connection can increase trust, and recognize the value you provide.
Taking customers out to dinner or drinks is a common way to connect with them. This can be costly when working with people who live far away, however.
The right virtual experience can facilitate these positive interactions while also decreasing the time it takes to close deals. As was previously mentioned, sellers who partner with Teamraderie to connect with their buyers on average experience a 20% increase in their pipeline win rate.
8. Go Above and Beyond
An excellent way to show your customers that you value and appreciate them is to go above and beyond in providing excellent customer service.
Your first priority should be to meet their needs. However, taking the extra step and providing additional value will go a long way in strengthening your positive relationship with them.
An excellent way to accomplish this is by engaging your accounts with distinctive experiences from Teamraderie.
Share coffee or tea while having conversations that move the deal closer to closing, or develop your creativity together by learning how to think outside the box. Each of our experiences offers unique benefits that you can share with your customers to increase engagement and connection.
9. Prioritize Your Employees
Employee experience (EX) is your employees’ interactions with your organization, and how those interactions impact their well-being, role, and satisfaction.
Treating CX and EX as two completely different things is a common mistake leaders make. According to HBR, factors like employee burnout and frustration can result in poor CX, since your customers will likely interact with your team.
If you’re hoping to make your CX as positive as possible, it’s important not to neglect your team.
Teamraderie has a variety of experiences designed to improve various outcomes in your organization, from connection and inclusion to innovation and communication.
Building Meaningful Customer Connections With Teamraderie
Partnering with Teamraderie to deliver experiences to customers is an excellent way to foster meaningful relationships with your them.
For example, a leading SaaS organization with more than 100 customers partnered with Teamraderie and discovered that 85% of their customers rated them as a more engaging and effective partner as a result.
If you’re interested in learning more, click here to learn more about how Teamraderie can help you engage with your customers and deepen your relationships with them. If you’re ready to take the next steps, browse our experiences to find one that fits your needs.
