How to Build a Profitable Business Relationship

As a business owner, you build relationships with every contact you make. Whether you're attending a happy hour with other business owners in your community or helping a customer solve a problem over the phone, it's a chance to make a positive impression. Being consistently helpful and upbeat creates a more profitable business.

Instructions

1. Attend networking events whenever you can. Be a good listener and offer to be helpful in whatever way makes sense. The accountant who offers a new real estate agent advice on where to advertise in town is going to be remembered over the accountant who spent ten minutes pitching his services.

2. Be creative in building business relationships with your colleagues. You're usually safe connecting with a business in another industry. Consider this profitable scenario: the owner of the new smoothie store in town prints up coupons, then distributes them to all the local health clubs. In return she displays their brochures in her place of business.

3. Take your relationships with your customers seriously by being courteous and responsible with every transaction. Remember that people don't have to return to your store. Search Amazon.com for books by Don Peppers and Martha Roberts, who've been writing about customer relationships since the 1980s.

4. Invest in online relationships the same way you would invest in face-to-face relationships. Online alliances and customer contacts can be just as profitable. Search engines tally up the links pointing to your site, so email the owners of sites with content related to your business.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't immediately reject the idea of giving your services or products for free. It's an investment in the future of your business, but make sure it doesn't require too much of your time or money. You get what you give.