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Your business relationships are more important than you might think. This post provides some helpful advice for building better ones.
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It takes ages to build a strong relationship and just a few moments to shatter it. More or less, the same can be said about the nature of every personal relationship. However, people often do not realize that a similar principle applies to business relationships as well. In fact, the breaking of a business relationship may do more harm than that of a personal one.
How Important Are Your Business Relationships?
A fractured personal relationship causes emotional distress, while a wrecked commercial relationship causes monetary loss. Naturally, financial damage in turn causes emotional trauma. Hence, a solid business relationship is vital to the well-being of your business as well as your mind.
For these reasons, we highlight here a few tips that help build long-lasting business relationships.
Why Do Business Relationships Collapse?
Before we propose the remedy to the problem, we need to understand the problem itself. Let’s get to its root cause so that we can prevent the problem in the future. After all, it is better to prevent a disease than to cure it.
There might be several reasons why a relationship with any stakeholder may collapse, but the fundamental ones include:
- Indulging in unethical activities and the breaking of trust.
- Failure to uphold a promise made to impress the other party.
- Being unable to let go of arrogance.
- Being unnecessarily rigid and formal.
- Collision of personalities.
- Lack of proper interaction and communication.
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How to Build Lasting Business Relationships
In order to evade the angst of a troubled business relationship and to enhance those relationships instead, we offer the following pointers:
Work on Developing Trust
Unquestionably, one of the most crucial building stones to every business relationship is trust. Trust between parties in any relationship must be firm. A tower with a shaky foundation may collapse after a few strong gusts. Similarly, faking your ideologies and pretending to be someone you are not will not get you very far. Once trust is broken, all is lost.
When trust is gone, that can lead to the downfall of a business relationship. Therefore, be authentic and truthful in every aspect of the relationship. Never try to build a false reputation in the other party’s eyes.
Be the First to Offer Something
A business relationship is undoubtedly a mutually beneficial link. However, keep your towering expectations at bay. Never expect instant positive results from the relationship. Instead, be the first to offer valuable services to the other party. This will not only enhance your connection but will also help you formulate a positive image. This in turn will bring you closer to attaining your business-related goals. Impatience can be detrimental in this regard.
Open Up and Share Common Business Challenges
Again, a business relationship is not about showing the other party how great you are and what a renowned achiever you have become. Just like with a personal bond, you need to open up a bit. So accept your vulnerabilities and show that underneath that expensive suit, you are a normal human being like them. If you do the opposite and think very highly of yourself to impress the other party, you are on the wrong track. Being around an egotistical and self-obsessed person is the last thing anyone wants to do.
Engage Them in Fun and Entertaining Activities
John Davison Rockefeller, an American business tycoon and humanitarian, said, “A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.” Never remain rigid and formal with your business partners. In fact, try to do something fun together to strengthen the bond.
You can surf through their Facebook account to learn about their hobbies. Or, if they are not very social, you can retrieve some information about them from Nuwber. Just type their full name in the search bar, press enter, and inspect the information that comes up. Then, politely ask them to join you for a golf game, paragliding, or whatever sport they are interested in. Or ask them about their family or anything else you could discuss together.
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Maintain and Retain the Relationship
You have successfully built a strong business relationship and reaped its fruits. So what do you do next? Discontinue communication until you need them again? Even if you have the best product or service in the world, you need to appropriately maintain a business relationship for your business’s long-term prosperity.
Cutting contact after fulfilling your goals will create a horrible image in the other party’s mind. It will close the doors of any opportunities you could get through them. Besides, it is inhuman and selfish to do so in the first place. Therefore, maintain contact and don’t act as if the relationship only had commercial value to you.
Conclusion
To summarize, an important and long-lasting business relationship operates according to most key principles of personal relationships. It necessitates the same, if not more, devotion. Even if the connection is primarily about business and mutual profit, acts of compassion and humanity will yield surprising benefits and provide the groundwork for a long-term partnership.