The Sacred Client Relationship

The Sacred Client Relationship

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 43 of the Business Development Podcast, and today we are chatting the critical importance of business development and client relationships. We are gonna chat about what to do, what not to do, and what never to do on today's episode. Stay tuned.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more. This is the Business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In broadcasting to the world, you'll get.

Expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development Capital bd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host. Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello. Welcome to episode 43 of the Business Development Podcast. I hope you guys are having an absolutely amazing week. Just let me start out by apologizing for any audio issues we may have. I am recording from a new location. It's not perfect yet, so if there's a little bit of echo I am trying to screen it out, but my apologies.

It may be like, This for a little bit, but we will get it rectified as soon as we can. It is episode 43 and we are at our five month anniversary of the Business Development Podcast. That's right, five months. So much has happened in that time. We're sitting at 51,000 downloads. We won the Best Business Podcast 2023 from Quill, Inc.

Once again, thank you Quill, Inc. And everybody who voted for us. It was amazing. To win that award. And we are just clipping along 43 episodes to date. And I just wanna also start this episode by giving a big thank you to Jim Gale. Jim Gale was our expert guest for last episode, episode 42.

Entrepreneurship is the ultimate freedom. Jim Gale is an amazing man. He's done a lot of cool things, and it was very cool to have him on his show to share his vision of Food Forest Abundance. Thank you, Jim, for joining us and telling your story. What an amazing one it was. I also just wanna say Happy Canada Day.

Canada Day was just over the weekend for US Canadians, and today is the recording. Today is July 4th, independence Day for My American Friends. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you guys are having an absolutely amazing Independence Day, and you had a great long weekend to go along with it.

Today's episode, I wanted to talk about something. It may not be that long, but it is very critical to talk about, and that is the business development and client relationship. This one also feeds into my account management people for the people that are doing business development and are also doing account management.

Do you remember, I always talk that we wanna separate our business development and account management just makes it more efficient, allows business development to trace all that new opportunity to find those, those new connections. Allows our account managers to be rock stars and to make great relationships with those current current clients.

Right. But I understand it gets blended a lot. I was blended in it for years, so I totally understand. Totally get that. There's a lot of you doing both and this show is a little bit for you today, but it also, it also goes in for our client relationships with our business development people because client relationships are absolutely, Critical.

They are sacred and they must be protected. This, this episode today is going to have a little bit of a story to go with it because I broke this rule once I was asked to break it. But I learned my lesson and I'm hopefully gonna impart this lesson onto each and every one of you today. I will tell my story at the end, but I definitely want to talk about the critical things that are most important about a client and business development slash account management relationship.

Okay. Honesty and integrity are critical to the relationship between yourself and your client. You never ever wanna lie to your client. You always want to tell the truth whenever possible, always, right? We wanna, we wanna always be telling the truth to our clients clients and bringing them, making sure that we're not overpromising anything or we're not delivering what we said we are going to deliver, right?

Because what we want to build with our clients is trust. We need to build trust and. Two-way communication and an open, honest relationship. And we do that by being honest and having integrity and always standing behind our product and service. You know, we shout it from the rooftops, but we gotta stand behind it too, even when it doesn't necessarily do what we hoped it would do.

Okay? And that means sometimes that we gotta eat, we gotta eat what we said we were gonna do, right? If it didn't work out for our client, we need to rectify that. We need to make sure that our clients are looked after always, and as business development reps, as account managers. It is our job as the go between, between our client and the company we're working for or that we run to be able to make sure that our client is compensated fairly in the event that things do not go in the way that we expect them to.

It is always critical to, to protect that client relationship whenever possible because, It's hard to get good clients and it's very hard to keep them, and if we can keep them and we keep them happy and we just do the things we need to do to make sure that they're looked after, they're going to come back again and again and again.

Okay. We never, ever, ever put our client in a compromising position. We never bribe them. We never ask them to do something illegal or unethical. We act ethically whenever possible because it is critical for us to act ethically and make good choices. That is. Almost expected. But you know, you may be asked to do things that are unethical.

You know, sometimes you might be asked to lie. You might be asked to cheat your client in one way or another. And you know what? You need to ask yourself, is that the person that you want to be at the end of the day? Do you want to make decisions that put yourself or your clients in a compromising position?

Because I think. The answer is no. We always want to do the best we can for our clients at Capital. I go outta my way and do whatever I can to make sure that my client is successful and happy. Why? Because I know that if I do a great job for them, they will refer other clients my way. They will continue to send repeat business my way, and it is a lot easier to keep a client than it is to gain a new one.

And so, We have to make sure that we are looking after our clients. Our clients are precious. We wouldn't have businesses without them and it's important that we don't lose sight of this. And as business development people, I know you might not feel connected to the end product cuz maybe you just made those introductions and did those things and you know, they, you take orders or whatever, but.

The reality is, is that it is important that you, you are the keeper of those relationships. You really are account managers, business development people. You are likely the keepers of that client relationship. And it is important as the keeper to always be advocating for the client, doing what we can to keep them happy and to keep them satisfied.

Right. Okay. We always want to build friendships and trust, right? All interactions with our clients need to be positive. Okay? We're gonna get into this later on. Cause that is, that is a part where I made a mistake once and I knew better and I did it anyway and burnt myself, and I will, we'll get into that.

But always keep the relationship with your client as positive and high energy and happy as possible because our clients, they are. That relationship is so critical in the business development rep client relationship, it has to be positive because you're always reaching out to them. You're checking in for them for, for, you know, new opportunities.

What's coming up next year, you're probably doing the outings and lunches and you, heck, if you're doing the account management, then you're really doing those fun outings and lunches and stuff to try to keep things kind of fresh and to keep them, keep up to date with what's going on with our client companies and what opportunities are coming down the road potentially for us.

Right? So we need to make sure that. When we call our clients, they pick up, right, okay, well how do we make sure they pick up? We make sure that every interaction we have with them is positive, right? It, you're, you are not the one, you're not the bearer of bad news. And we are gonna get into this down the line here, but we need to keep all client facing interactions as positive as we possibly can, as business development people, as account reps, because it is.

It is us. We are the keepers of the relationship between the company and the client. We really are, and by being the keeper we need to make sure that we are protecting that responsibility and that responsibility is to be positive, to have positive interactions with our customers, which means. Yep.

We're gonna get into it down the line. We are not making negative phone calls to our customers. If our customers aren't paying or something's going wrong with a project. Business development people are not the people calling to rectify that situation. You need to have someone else. We're gonna get into that, but it needs to be somebody else.

Okay. We need to always be the best call of their day. So we'll get kind of back into that with positive interaction, right? Business development people need to be the best call of the day. We need to be leaving voicemails for our clients. We need to be leaving happy, positive messages. We need to be talking to them in a positive.

Affirmative way to make sure that they are always getting the best version of us, which goes into why we can, we can't be the people with the bearer of bad news because if suddenly we're leaving voicemails and stuff that are asking for things or to delivering bad news, well now we've compromised ourselves.

We've compromised ourselves and our, the way that we look in the eye of the customer is no longer necessarily that, that. Great phone caller, that friend. Now we've tarnished it with potentially some negativity, and that can really drive a wedge into the relationship that you are trying to build and accumulate with your client.

Okay. We are always providing top quality products or services. So you guys know I got into this in a previous show. If you are currently working for a company that does not sell reputable services, that asks you to compromise your morals and values, that asks you to lie to your customer or to do things that.

Internally you do not agree with, you need to go elsewhere. Okay? There's a million other jobs. There really is. There's a million other jobs. Don't compromise yourself. Don't lie on behalf of a company. Don't, don't compromise your moral integrity just, just for a company, because the reality is you don't have to do that.

There's a lot of companies selling reputable, great products that deliver over and over again, that the customer gets what they pay for, that they're happy, that they're satisfied with the product or service. Those are the services we need to be standing behind. We need to be standing behind products and services that will improve our customer's day, that will improve their business, and will do what needs to be done so that you get repeat business over and over and over again, and you can sleep at night because it is critical that you're doing something that you're proud of.

Right? In business development, we have to, we have to shout our, we have to shout our company from the rooftops. We have to be the number one advocates. We need to be the cheerleaders for our businesses and. It's very hard to cheerlead for a business that you don't believe in that sells crappy products or that is compromising your moral values, right?

So, Lots of companies out there, guys, lots of companies out there don't work for ones that that don't have top quality products or services. The reality is there's there's a ton of them out there that do, and you don't have to compromise yourself. And I would never ask a capital employee to compromise themselves.

I would never compromise myself on behalf of a company and frankly, I just wouldn't work for a company that I didn't agree with what they were doing, or their products or services did not make sense in some way or another. So you have to be able to get behind a product or service to do, sell it well, and there's lots of opportunities for you to do that.

Go find a company that you can 150% stand behind because number one, it's gonna make you a better business development and account rep. Number two, you're, you're just gonna have better relationships with your clients. You're gonna do a better job. You're going to be more, more active, more involved, and more invested.

Okay? All right. Don't have or have any negative client interaction from somebody else within the company. Okay? This is 100% critical, and if you take one thing away from this conversation today, it is this. If you were a business development or account rep and someone in your company, maybe your boss says, Hey, your company ABC isn't paying their product or service, or, heck, you know they did something and I don't like it.

Write them a dirty email or call them and ask them why they did this. Do not listen immediately. Do not listen. Tell them that your relationship with the client is critical and you're not going to be providing any negativity to that relationship. Have someone else do it, and this is 100%. Your boss may look at you and be like, what the heck?

But trust me, this is the 150% best. Choice that you have because if you tarnish that relationship, if you break that trust, that sacred relationship connection between account managers and clients or business development people and clients, you are potentially wrecking that relationship for life. Okay?

It's very, very, very hard to come back and rebuild the trust, rebuild, you know, all of that good vibes. With just even one big negative problem, which is why, you know, like it only takes one bad service or one bad. You know, product to really, really hurt a customer relationship. I've seen it happen over and over and over again where just one bad service or one bad product made that customer say, Nope, never again.

And you know what, like, I could even get into this with a internet provider that we have here in Canada. I'm not going to name them. They shall remain nameless, although I'll tell you, I had a horrible experience with them just a couple weeks ago where basically our install did not go well. It was gonna be late.

And so, you know, as you guys know, you know, I run my own company, I host this podcast. Internet is absolutely critical. And what ended up happening in this situation is they, they weren't able to provide service. They were gonna be two or three days late. And when they, when I said, well, you know, what are you guys going to do about this?

They're like, well, hey, we'll, we'll, we'll kick you at $20 credit. Let you know. Little did they know every single day that I don't have internet would cost me, you know, a lot of money and. It's just, it, it just seemed absolutely insane to me that that was their avenue. And you know, the thing that pissed me off the most about the whole situation was this.

When I called them, I, I got absolutely fed up with this internet provider. I called them to cancel my service. I called them and I just said, look, I'm done like this. This treatment was horrible. You guys made a gigantic mistake and your option to fix it was we'll give you 20 bucks, which was absolutely nonsensical.

If you know how much internet costs here're in Canada and Then they proceeded to offer me, you know, everything under the sun to try to get me to stay, which seems so backwards if they would've just done a great job upfront with that client relationship and said, Hey, you know what? We're absolutely sorry about what's happened here.

Here's a month free of internet. They actually offered me six months free of internet, and I still canceled. Why? Because I was treated like garbage in the beginning. I wasn't my, my situation was not rectified at the time that it should have been Rectified was right at the right, at the first issue, the first sign of problem.

Nothing was offered. They offered me $20. They li they went on down the line to offer me hundreds of dollars in services, but it seems so absolutely backwards. Like the situation there was so backwards. So anyways, internet company in Canada, I can't name them however. Yeah. It was, it was absolutely horrible.

So, client relate, client customer relationships are critical and you can, you can fix things, but you need to keep things positive and you need to offer good resolutions, not garbage resolutions. Good resolutions. Okay, so all negative client interaction needs to be from somebody else in the company, not the direct business development rep, not the person who.

Who is managing the day-to-day interactions with that customer, because that is the person who can bail you out of problems later, right? So if, if this is the situation, you wouldn't have your business development rep, your account manager, then reach out to the customer and say, Hey, got some bad news for you.

You would have an operations manager, an accounts person, somebody else in the company. Heck, maybe it's even the bloody president of the company, but somebody else in the company reach out to the customer and say, Hey, sorry we have some bad news. Love to rectify the situation for you, but this is what's happened.

And, and then allow that positive relationship to, to remain. Because although the customer may be upset in that situation, he may, he or she may not be upset at. At the business development rep or account rep, who they might be upset at is just the person who called or the company for a few days, but the account rep always has the opportunity to book another meeting, apologize for the situation, and move the things forward as long as that positive relationship is maintained.

Okay? So keep that in mind. Always have your business development reps, your account managers. Keep things positive. Always. If there's gonna be a negative interaction, it needs to be somebody else. It needs to be somebody else within the company. That way the business development rep or account manager can swing back in later with that positive relationship and hopefully rebuild the scenario, rebuild trust with the customer and either when that customer would back or maintain the relationship.

Okay. All right. If we treat our clients with respect, they will follow us for years. This is critical. This is absolutely critical. As business development reps, account reps, we are always treating our customers and clients with the utmost respect. We're making sure that we're delivering for them. Time, after time, after time, we're doing the best we can to provide the best and highest level of service and products that we can because if you can build that relationship strong, okay.

And, and you know what, you know, the situation in Canada is, especially in oil and gas, which is a big part of, of Alberta and the province that I live in, is it's, it's a gigantic industry, but it's also a very small industry. It's a gigantic industry, but the players are, are not huge. There's, there's like, you know, 20 or so big players.

Okay? And so what ends up happening is if you have somebody who's an expert in scm or you know, a director of scm, something like that, or you know, heck, depending on what your product or service is, the quality managers or the terminal managers or the whatever the facility managers. They tend to move from company to company in the same position.

So what does this mean for you? You've built this great relationship with a facility manager or a terminal manager, okay? And you've provided a amazing service for, let's say five years, and now they leave. Okay. Well, normally this could be a really challenging scenario because now you're trying to find, well, who's the new guy at the company?

Stuff like that. The cool thing about this situation is if you treated them like rock stars, they're going to carry you with them. They are going to take you to the next company. And not only are they gonna take you to the next company, they're probably gonna introduce you to their replacement at the current company.

So now, instead of just having that one client, you have two and you already know what he expects or she expects because you've done all the work to make sure that you've built that relationship strong, right? So, It's awesome. You know, building great relationships. They follow you. They follow you for your career, not just for a job, but for your career.

They don't go away. And so you have the ability to leverage those connections the next year, the next year, the next year, the next company, and they follow you from place to place to place. So building critical relationships, having a positive relationship with your clients is absolutely critical. And it is detrimental to your success in business development and account management, and so it is absolutely critical to protect that relationship no matter what happens.

Okay. And I know we're not at Christmas. I know this is very, very early, but we're gonna just talk about it briefly. Okay. Very briefly. I'm gonna have a whole nother show on this. I think probably come October, November. Cause I think that's probably when you should be prepping at bare minimum. But, Christmas gifts for your clients.

Okay. Yeah, I get it. We don't all celebrate Christmas. That's okay. It is still a recognized holiday around the world. Okay. And, you know, regardless of whether it's Christmas in Canada or United States, or you know, you celebrate some other holiday around the world, there's always holidays with gift giving, no matter where you're at in the world.

Okay. And it is absolutely critical that we are giving back to our clients that we are giving back and saying, thank you for, for trusting me. Thank you for all of the business. You've sent our way over the year, and I know it's not much, but here is a thank you and it is critical that we are giving our customers and clients Christmas gifts of some type.

Okay, I get that. We have to be very careful with this. Yes. We have to be very, very careful with this. A lot of companies have rules regarding gifting, right? There's dollar amount limits. There's certain things that are not allowed, however, Find out what they are and still comply within the legal or within the ethical boundaries that you are allowed to work within.

Because you know what? Giving, giving a customer, you know, you know, a bottle of something or a little gift bag or a backpack with a shirt and a hat in it, typically branded items are not, not frowned upon. So it never hurts just to give them back, you know, give them a bag, give them some shirts, give them a sweater, give them a hat or, or you know, give them a bottle of wine or whatever, whatever you're gonna give them.

And just say thank you. Thank you so much for being our customer. I know it's not much, but you know, we appreciate you and we think of you at this time. And a card and a little bag or something like that is always appreciated. At Capital we give out, we typically give out bags or branded bags with some shirts or hats and stuff in them and, and and a Christmas card that we create.

And they're always customized to our clients. And, you know, it's not much, it doesn't take an absolute ton of time. It doesn't cost a fortune, and it is always appreciated. Always appreciate it cuz clients love to know that you think about them. And part of your job as account management or business development is to show your clients that they matter to you.

That you actually care about the relationship and the outcome of that relationship. And so, giving a little gift at Christmas or whatever the holiday is that you gift give in your country is absolutely critical and should be honored. Okay. I'm gonna close today's episode with a story with a story of the time that I broke this golden rule.

Okay, and it has a happy ending. I was able to maintain and fix the relationship, although I'm not sure that it ever came back to the level that it was at before, and I'm not confident that I ever did fix it. Completely. So even though we ended up getting future orders from them, we did more work with them.

I did more work with them through other companies. I tarnished the relationship and I tarnished it because I wasn't thinking and I made a huge mistake. And I'm just gonna get into the story now. Okay. So I was working for a company and we were providing services. We were providing manpower services.

Okay. And we had a customer, it was a relatively large oil and gas construction company here in here in Canada, in Alberta. And I had built an amazing relationship with, with the customer. We're gonna call a customer, John. Okay. I had a great relationship with John, and I had worked with John since literally the beginning of my business development career.

You know, this company was one of my very first clients, and I'd worked with him at this point for probably eight years off and on. And we ended up having an issue where John had requested some personnel and had a date, had a site, had everything figured out. We had sourced them, we had gotten everything going.

And right before, like, I think it was the day before they were supposed to go out to a site, we got an email from John saying, sorry, you know, we actually had some personnel come available within the company. And we won't be needing these two personnel. But thank you so much for doing that for us. We really appreciate it.

And we apologize for the inconvenience. This was essentially the email sent to us. A manager I had at the time got upset with this email and said, Kelly, you need to reach out to John and you need to say, look, you know, we don't appreciate that. We don't appreciate this last minute cancellation, and we would very much appreciate that you, that this didn't happen again.

And yep, I was dumb enough to send that email. Yes, I was, I admit, complete, complete responsibility. It was stupid. I, I knew better and I should have said to my manager at the time, absolutely not. You send it or somebody else send this or just. Better off. Don't send anything and wait for the next opportunity.

Anyways, this message was sent. The response was not great, as you would imagine, and it really, really hurt that relationship and I eventually, I. Came back on my hands and knees groveling and said, look, I am absolutely sorry for sending that. We, you know, we don't wanna hurt this relationship and I would love any opportunity to rebuild it with you.

So the reality is I had to go back anyway, even despite sending that horribly crafted email that my manager had asked me to send, I had to go back anyway and apologize and try to rebuild that relationship because the, we, we broke, we broke the trust, we broke the relationship in that one email. We broke an eight year relationship with a company that never needed to be broken.

And you know, it could have still been, it still could have been sent in a different way by somebody else. It 100% could have been, but the fact is it came from me. It came from the trusted account manager. The business development rep, the guy who had worked for years to build this relationship. And like I said, I did eventually rebuild this relationship.

Thank goodness I, I, I was very close with this person, so I was able to come back and say, John, I am so sorry. I, I knew better. I should have never sent that. I understand that that wasn't your fault, and I apologized for the way that I acted in that situation, but I had to take ownership for it, and it was me because I knew better.

It wasn't my manager. He didn't know better. I did know better, and I should have never done that. And so, Point is, is that your client, customer business development rep, account manager relationship is sacred. It's critical to the success of your organization, and you do not compromise it no matter what.

You do not send stupid emails. You do not yell or cuss out your customer for any reason, because the reality is it takes you years to build those relationships and it takes one bad interaction for the whole house to come tumbling down. Okay? All right. That is the end of our episode. Five months. Five months, 51,000 downloads.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you. If you are. A loyal business development podcast listener. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for coming back week over week. Thank you for telling your friends and family. Thank you for the follows. Likes, subscriptions, they go a long way.

Any reviews you guys can send also go an absolute long way. So if you have the moment to write a review for us today, it would be greatly appreciated on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or heck right on my website. It's always very much appreciated. I just wanna give some shout outs. Shout outs this week are, Paul Coratella, Aaron Haberman and Samuel Drauschak.

Thank you so much for reaching out. They all reached out this week and gave us really positive information. I'm getting a lot of reaches out on LinkedIn of just people le leaving us, like little reviews on LinkedIn. If this is you and you're leaving reviews on LinkedIn, if you could please leave us one on, like I said, apple Podcast, Spotify, or write on my website, there's a review section on my website.

Greatly appreciate it guys. It goes a long way. The LinkedIn ones just go to me. I love reading them, believe me. I love reading them. Copy and paste it and send it on our website or send it on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Cause that helps us to grow our audience. It can be read by other people and it's very, very much appreciated.

If you are enjoying the show and you have a, a question for the show, we have a section now called Community Questions. I'm, I'm, my goal is to have it once a month. I have not received enough questions yet to be able to do that. I. But if you do have a question that you can submit to us that maybe is important to your business or important to you, and you would like it to be read on the air and then answered on the air with an acknowledgement to yourself I would love to do that.

I would love to do that for you. Please send it to me, subject line, community Questions to podcast@capitalbd.ca. That's podcast@capitalbd.ca, and I will address them on a future episode of Community Questions. Until next time, this has been The Business Development Podcast. I'm Kelly Kennedy. I will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca . See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.