Building Relationships with Your Clients: A Guide for Solopreneurs

Articles, Selling

Let’s start with this. As a solopreneur, perhaps even more so than any other enterprise, your success is directly tied to your ability to create and maintain relationships.

Unless you are going outside your organization, you likely don’t have marketing and sales teams to bring in new business. You’ve got you and you likely rely to a great extent on referrals. I can say this with a certain degree of authority as … I are one:) I left a lifetime of sales management and ownership positions to go solo in 2006.

Building any relationship, let alone a quality long-term one, takes time and effort. On top of that, these activities don’t stop once that relationship has been established. “What have you done for me … lately?”  

Business relationships are no different than personal ones. If you have a significant other, did that happen overnight? Do you still have to put in the work to keep that relationship in place? I’m guessing that you do!

Relationship “building blocks”

  • It starts with listening as you learn more, and you show a genuine interest in, others. Their interests, their challenges, your shared commonalities.
  • For your part, seek to educate rather than to sell. Help them to be more successful at what they do. Create items of value to share. 
  • Along those same lines … promote them where possible and refer them where appropriate.
  • You must create touch points that are focused on quality and this must be done consistently. This isn’t set and forget.

How Nimble CRM helps

  • Nimble contact records contain a complete history of all of your engagements with this company or individual. Refer to these prior to your next engagement.
  • Create and save notes regarding your conversations. Don’t rely on your memory!
  • Not following up when you promised to do so is a relationship killer! Stay on track with tasks. Nimble will remind you to complete these.
  • Stay in touch reminders are specifically designed to ensure to engage with this contact based on a minimum, user defined, schedule.
  • Tags in Nimble CRM help you to organize your contacts. You can even easily mark any contact as being important.
  • I have created custom fields for myself that contain the most important relationship-building data on a contact and these are displayed in their own field box, front and center.
  • Nimble’s workflows can represent your essential process for beginning any relationship. If it works, replicate it!
  • As a part of client education, create a newsletter for those who will appreciate it. It’s all within Nimble. There is no need for an additional third-party application like Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

Quality relationships will undoubtedly lead to more repeat business and referrals. I don’t have to tell you that these types of opportunities will yield an exceedingly high closing ratio! I would strongly suggest that you devote the majority of your time and efforts to these folks, and this is likely a small subset of your contact base, as opposed to chasing after the great masses.

Please be sure to check out these top 100 sales blogs on Feedspot. I am honored to be one of them!

Are you thinking about a CRM? If you would like to explore whether or not Nimble CRM might be right for you, please book a free 30-minute Zoom consultation with me by going to my calendar. To learn more about our Nimble training and implementation services, please visit our Nimble CRM training services page.  

In addition to Nimble CRM, I also offer sales training and training on LinkedIn as well as getting started with AI (Artificial Intelligence). I can even assist with hiring new salespeople with initial interviews and training. 

I would also be happy to connect you to a marketing professional who I know and trust or to an automated yet personalized and human-to-human LinkedIn prospecting system. Please reach out to me at craig@adaptive-business.com for an introduction!

Craig M. Jamieson

Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services
Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!
Craig M. Jamieson

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