Recently I was doing some weeding in my mother’s garden – a garden where my brother-in-law is working on turning some of his fingers green.
Well it transpires I actually wasn’t weeding. I found this out when my brother-in-law came running over to me telling me in extremely colourful language to leave his carrots alone – the carrots he had lovingly grown from seed!
Now he and I get along very well. And I’m glad we do – partly because he’s 4 inches taller than me and about 25 lbs heavier! We got over our little hiccup and had a good laugh about it.
How did we manage that?
Simple. We’ve built a good relationship over more than 20 years and we know, like and trust each other.
Do you have relationships like that with your customers and suppliers? Of course sometimes purchases or sales in business are purely transactional. And sometimes the nature of the transaction is that it’s a one-off, e.g., engaging a funeral director.
But other times a sale can and should be viewed as the beginning of a relationship. And such relationships can be nurtured. Then, even if you pull up that customer’s carrots, you’ve a chance of recovering!
If you’d like to receive posts like this as emails just sign up below and they’ll come direct to your intray – roughly once a week.
