Managing Your Brand in The Internet Echo Chamber
July 21, 2010The #7links Challenge – A Look Back at The Last Few Months
July 23, 2010Today I want to talk about customer relationships and how they are a journey not points in time.
Have you ever heard of the old saying from Confucius:
A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step
I think there is a lot of wisdom in this saying when it comes to building relationships with our customers in that when we engage with our customers it should be about a journey and not just a sale. Why is it then when we set up journeys, transactions, experiences, contracts, projects, engagements etc with customers that we can often find ourselves getting lost in the journey and not resurfacing til the end of the process?
Why not break this journey down a little and celebrate some of your smaller wins? Is not celebrating small wins hard-wired into our DNA? Isn’t it something that we have learned to love and expect growing up? As children from our first step, to our first word, our first date, our first solo bike ride and all the way through to starting our first business, winning our first contract or getting our first promotion and so on. I think that we expect to celebrate small wins along our journeys. Recognition is a basic human need and people feel good and recognise that they/we are making progress.
What small wins are you skipping over or could you be recognising? Where could you inject a little joy and recognition into the journey? Doing this will helps us understand that strategy and goals can sometimes be a long way off and the way from time to time to reach these can be hard. Celebrating the smaller wins can help us bring us closer to our customers, improve communications and strengthen our relationships with them.
A few words of caution. Don’t get distracted by your celebrations. Make sure you link it to your project and journey milestones or intermediary targets.
Thanks to roym for the image
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2 Comments
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