Positive Professional Relationships – do you understand and benefit from the difference they make?

The skills to build great professional relationships are key to business development.

What you do and making sure people who need your help can find you are key, but it is your ability to build relationships that makes prospective clients and introducers choose you in a crowded marketplace.

In a service business, people are what clients are ‘buying’ – it’s not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’.

It’s about minimising challenges too

Good relationships minimise daily challenges. A positive client relationship with clear expectations and communication minimises the hassle you get. A positive relationship makes it easier to give a client a challenging message.

Naturally, core skills and knowledge of your area of work expertise are vital particularly if you have a technical role like many of my clients – lawyer, actuary, accountant, compliance manager. However, this knowledge really will only take you so far. It also makes individuals and businesses highly comparable. As I said, it is the relationships individuals and therefore businesses have that create differentiation.

The key benefits of positive professional relationships:

• Improving productivity and therefore increased revenue and profit.

• Decision making, involving the right people and getting their valuable input to reach better client outcomes.

• Retaining clients and increasing the value of those clients to the business.

• Bringing in new clients.

• Retaining top talent.

• Developing careers.

• Creating a more positive work culture.

Many of these are interlinked but nevertheless, it is an important list. Who wouldn’t want all of these benefits in their business? Which client doesn’t want to feel valued?

Positive professional relationships are not simply a ‘nice to have’.

Important considerations

The starting point to relationships is making the time then thinking about your personal impact so how you communicate yourself to others and engage with them. This needs to take into account different situations and means of communication e.g. in person, Teams calls, emails, your LinkedIn profile…

Then there are core skills to developing relationships – to be able to work well with different people and naturally specific skills are needed for different professional situations.

Getting started

Have you considered all the benefits of great professional relationships listed above? Have you thought about how you and your team can improve? In which situations? Which skills are missing?

Very few people are naturally great at relationship skills in all situations, all of the time, so there are always elements to work on.

If you’d like to talk to me about what development your people could benefit from to improve internal working and grow your business, or you are looking for an engaging speaker for your next event to inspire people to think differently about business development, get in touch for a no-obligation conversation.