Influence is key to any successful business or client-supplier relationship. These relationships form the backbone of any enterprise, working together to better each other through mutual reciprocity. Understanding a client and their goals can help facilitate these relationships, and when coupled with proper influence training, these business relationships are bound to bring lasting success to both parties.
The Importance of Client Retention on Influence
Behind any successful business is a healthy, mutually beneficial client relationship. When looking for any service, a client needs to find a business they can trust to facilitate a task, which requires that businesses have a firm grasp on how they present their services to potential clients. For existing clients, organization and communication are imperative for holding onto these client relationships. Negotiating and making current clients aware of any changes to important business features or policy updates allows these clients to feel as if they can rely on the services they requested.
Understanding what a client asks for beyond a service request is important for fostering a proper working relationship. It can also create an opportunity to build a deeper and more meaningful relationship with a client. For example, if a client prioritizes effective communication and efficiency for certain tasks, creating a highly oriented team around effective output and transparent communication can benefit that client relationship. For others, highlighting operational goals and milestones to facilitate employee productivity may be a priority, and keeping track of each client’s specific requests helps increase client retention by showing that this business cares about its client’s specific needs.
For businesses with international clientele, understanding the cultural differences between clients is critical for formulating a proper business relationship. This attention to detail makes clients feel highlighted by the business they work with, making them more likely to return as repeat customers. Cultural variations are present across every society, with some highlighting certain business approaches over others as more successful, and for an accurate business plan, understanding these variations for each approach can appear more insightful to potential clients. Effective client retention begins with having a strong influential stance in all business relationships, helping facilitate ideas between a business and its clients.
Effective Influence Training Strategies for Relationship Building
The foundation of any influence-based approach comes from an understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy on influence. Credibility and ethics, ethos, emotional understanding, pathos, and an appeal to logic and reasoning, logos, come together to form the three tenants of influence. These three tenants can effectively be worked into various business scenarios, including:
- Pathos through Reinforced Partnerships: The emphasis on teamwork between colleagues and clients creates a mutually reinforced respect for one another. When asked for help, always oblige the request, and reinforce these mutually beneficial relationships, creating a lasting impression for future projects. Those in influential positions can use that not only to help form a better understanding of one’s team but it can also encourage creating more productive relationships between staff members. For clients, if a client asks for a specific piece of writing or section of a contract for review, always provide it, treating these clients as equally involved in business decisions.
- Logos through Effective Communication: Using an appeal to logic for business communications, especially for more uncertain situations that could cause some to panic, playing towards psychology surrounding risk and loss can effectively help convince others to get on board with a certain idea. For example, if addressing a group of employees about a shift in company policy, instead of focusing on the positives of that shift, highlighting the drawbacks of not changing these systems over can be more influential for decision-making than the positives alone. Loss is a large motivating factor, and facing what can be lost, head-on addresses those fears that could be inhibiting the decision-making abilities of others, thus pushing them in the desired direction.
- Ethos through Transparency: One of the biggest setbacks in client relations is the disconnect between a business and its clientele. Being fully transparent, coupled with a sense of authority on subjects that affect both the company and the client, creates a sense of credibility in business dealings that can heavily impact a client relationship. Utilizing data, facts about the business, and any important figures that relate to a certain business decision when communicating changes helps create credible proof as to why these decisions are made. For instance, if a certain advertising campaign decides to change its social media strategy to pivot toward a particular platform, providing the statistics on why this change is made, such as engagement rates across all platforms, can allow clients to feel more comfortable deciding to switch business models.
These core tenants to influence creation can be seen in various business practices, but the necessary way to pull these together is through action. Any successful, influential relationship relies on a firm grasp of these three ideas while using the appropriate means of action to facilitate business dealings. Without the appropriate follow-through, any efforts to cultivate these relationships may be wasted.
Utilizing Influence Training for Successful Business Relationships
Understanding the effectiveness of influence training comes from having strong foundational knowledge of what “influence” means in a business context. Negotiation training is essential for businesses looking to increase client retention, creating working relationships that keep clientele feeling recognized and appreciated for their business.