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Building Relationships with Corporate Executives

www.ianbrodie.com The Corporate Executive Relationship Toolkit Page !1

Hey there!

Welcome to this Executive Relationship Building Toolkit.

In it you’ll find strategies, tips and tools that will help you build stronger relationships, faster, with your ideal corporate executive clients.

But before we dive in, let’s look first at why building relationships with executives is so vital if you want to land corporate clients.

After all, most marketing advice focuses on “lead generation”. Getting that first contact with a potential client in a corporate.

And, of course, that’s important. It’s the critical first step.

But the truth is that clients are rarely ready to hire you or buy from you when they very first meet you.

Partly that’s because the timing usually isn’t right. If you’ve approached them, the chances are that they’re not looking to hire someone to do what you do yet. And even if they’ve come looking for

Ian Brodie

http://www.ianbrodie.com

Why Executive Relationships are Vital


you, they’re probably still exploring their problem and they’re not committed to moving forward yet.

Just as importantly, before they’re going to be ready to make a big investment in hiring an external professional or buying a significant product; you’re going to need to build a high degree of trust and credibility before they’ll be ready to go with you.

That doesn’t happen overnight.

In addition, once they’ve hired you for the first time or bought a product from you, that’s just the beginning.

Now you're a vendor. Someone they’ve bought from once.

What you really want is to be seen as a partner or trusted advisor. Someone they buy from again and again.

Someone they share ideas with before they’re ready to buy so you get the inside track.

Someone viewed as a “safe pair of hands” they can trust their most important projects to.

Someone they’re prepared to pay a premium to work with rather than beat down on price all the time.

Someone they’ll recommend to others inside and outside their organisation.

That’s why executive relationship building is so vital.


The Keys to Successful Executive Relationship Building


So, what do you need in your toolkit to successfully build executive relationships with corporates?

Well, the first critical component is that you’ve got to have a solid process for relationship building.

You can’t wait for your potential clients to contact you to interact with them to build your relationship. And you can’t rely on fortuitous or accidental interactions when you bump into them at events or an obvious reason to keep in touch presents itself.

You need to be proactive with your communications, and that comes from process.

A Simple Process for Building Executive Relationships

The first step in your executive relationship building process is to decide who you want to build

relationships with.

To build powerful relationships takes time. So you can only build them with a small number of clients and potential clients at once.

Take the time to analyse and decide which of


The Relationship Building Process


your current clients and prospective clients you want to strengthen your relationships with. Your choice could be based on the amount of future work you could win with them. Or it might be the type of work available, a great fit with them personally, or the fact they’d be a marquee client that would give your greater visibility.

Whatever your criteria, make a small number of selections to focus on (you can always add more later if you have the capacity). And don’t worry about trying to get it perfect first time. If your relationship building efforts fall short with some of the names on the list, you can easily drop them and add others.

Next, make sure you’ve gathered together

everything you know about these target executives.

Your ability to communicate with them in ways that add value and build your relationship will be in direct correlation to how much you know about them and what they care about.

In addition to publicly available information from Google and Linkedin and anything you can glean from common contacts, write down what you’ve learnt from your personal interactions with them.

This is where the richness of your communications and in particular your ability to ask great questions of your clients and potential


Make Relationship Building a Habit


clients can give you a huge relationship building advantage over those with less information.

We’ll come back to questioning skills later. For now, simply write down what you know already.

The final step of your relationship building process is to set up a regular review of your target relationship list and what you know about them.

Your goal is to make regular relationship building into a habit. Something you do week-in, week-out without fail.

So pick a time of the week to do your regular review and stick to it (I do mine on Monday mornings over a nice coffee in a local coffee shop right after I’ve done my planning for the week).

To do the review, simply read through the list of your clients and prospects along with what you know about them, and then brainstorm ideas for you you could enhance your relationship with them this week.

You can choose from a range of activities, for example:

‣ Send a relevant article or resource (preferably one you’ve written)

‣ Invite them to a seminar/event (preferably one you’re running)

‣ Make introductions to other useful contacts for them


Adding Value With Each Contact


‣ Hook into specific campaigns you’re running (e.g. events, a survey, etc.)

‣ Send something fun or related to one of their non-work interests

‣ Swap industry gossip‣ Just arrange a friendly call/coffee

None of these in their own right is revolutionary. But the key to relationship building isn’t doing one amazing thing. It’s consistently adding value and keeping in touch with your contacts.

Now, of course, when you do your reviews you won’t think of something to do with every contact every week. But by doing them you’ll come up with things a lot more regularly than if you rely on spontaneity.

And you’ll also find that by regularly reviewing your top relationship targets and what’s important to them you “prime” your brain to be on the lookout for things that might help your relationship.

So you’re much more likely to spot things you can communicate about during the rest of the week too.

Over time you’ll also begin to build up a “database” of topics and items to communicate about. If you spot an article in a trade magazine that’s useful for one potential client, the chances are it’ll be useful for another sometime in the future too. So store it away to reuse again later.


The Three Key Skills of Relationship Building Experts


The next component of your relationship building toolkit are the skills you’ve going to put in play.

Relationship Building Skills

Of course, there are a whole raft of skills involved in building relationships, but I’m going to focus on three key ones.

The first is your ability to ask great questions.

I mentioned earlier that you start your regular reviews that drive contacts by writing down what you know about your target relationships.

That knowledge doesn’t just descend on you from above. You have to work to get it by asking great questions in your interactions with clients and potential clients.

The best networkers and relationship builders are the ones who ask great questions and are great listeners. Asking great questions and finding out what current and potential clients really care about gives you many more opportunities to follow-up and communicate with them later about things they’re actually interested in and will take notice of.

I’m not talking here about their favourite sports


The Power of Great Questions


team or where they went last year for a vacation - though that can be useful too.

I’m talking primarily about their big business problems and issues. And their goals and aspirations. The things they're deeply about in business. The things they’re always looking for ideas and insights to help them with.

In other words, the topics they’d be interested in hearing from you about.

Now new contacts won’t open up straight away and tell you their deepest, darkest issues and fears. You have to earn their trust first.

But you can get a long way by asking insightful questions that go beyond the “what do you do?” and “how’s business?” that so many people use.

Ask your new contacts how they started in this line of business (everyone has an interesting story of what got them started). Ask them what their priorities are (this is much less risky to answer than what their problems are but essentially covers the same ground).

Ask them what they get the most excited about in their business. Or what they hope to achieve in the next year.

Don’t turn every interaction with them into an inquisition. But always be prepared with a couple


Using a Point of View


of questions for each of your contacts that will extend your knowledge of them and enhance your relationship.

(By the way, a wonderful resource on how to ask great questions when dealing with executives is Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas’s book Power Questions).

The second skill to master is to always have a

valuable opinion.

This is another conversational skill that works wonders to build relationships. I first heard it from my friend Charlie Green, author of The Trusted

Advisor and Trust Based Selling. I asked Charlie

“what’s the fastest way to build trust with a potential client?”.

I was expecting an answer about soft skills, but instead, Charlie said “have a point of view…but get it across respectfully”.

He went on to explain that as an advisor to senior clients if you don’t have a valuable point of view to share, something different to what they already think or know, then you’re wasting their time.

Senior executives already have plenty of “yes men” surrounding them. What they value is candour and challenge. Someone prepared to say what they think.

http://andrewsobel.com/books-by-andrew/power-questions/


http://andrewsobel.com/books-by-andrew/power-questions/

Extending Beyond Narrow Expertise


Your point of view might be about their industry or competition. It might be about your area of expertise.

Whatever it is, it needs to be unique to you and insightful and useful to your clients and potential clients. it has to be something that will help them and that they couldn’t hear from your competitors. Tired old clichés about working smarter not harder, about using stories for marketing or the importance of vision for leaders just won’t cut it.

You need to base your point of view on your own experience or research. Something that only you can create. And you need to put thought into how it can help your clients.

And you need to be able to get that point of view across in a way that doesn’t come across as arrogant or condescending. So ideally you present it in terms of your experience, what’s worked for others or case studies rather than “this is the one best way”.

The third skill is to be able to extend your

relationship beyond your expertise.

Inevitably, when you first build a relationship with a potential client or paying client they will see you as a narrow expert in the area you’re working with them on.

But if you want to become a long term partner or trusted advisor you’ll have to extend beyond


Position Yourself as a Business Person , Not Just a Specialist


that pigeonholing to become seen as a valuable resource to their business as a whole.

That’s why it’s vital for you to make sure you build your understanding of business in general, their industry, and their company specifically.

Read the business press and their industry journals. keep your ear to the ground for what’s going on in their organisations.

Be prepared for when they ask you questions outside your area of expertise. If you can answer intelligently you’ll become seen as a useful person to bounce ideas off and to seek advise from. If you don’t seem to know what they’re talking

about they’ll pigeon hole you as a narrow specialist.

When you get the chance, for example if you have coffee or lunch with a client, extend the discussion beyond the scope of your current work.

Ask them what they think about the recent new product launch of one of their competitors. Or if you think the upcoming changes in regulation will affect them. Or any question that demonstrates you’re up to speed with the big issues that impact their business.

By doing this you can position yourself as an


The Tools to Support You


insightful business person, in addition to being an expert in your field. That will make them much more willing to seek you out for advice on a broad range of issues and get you into their “inner circle” of trusted advisors.

The final element of your relationship building toolkit are the tools you can use to support your processes and skills.

Tools for Relationship Building

Now I should stress here that the tools are there to support your skills and processes, not to replace them. Relationships aren’t usually built sitting behind computer screens.

But these tools can provide you with valuable information and organisation that can make your relationship building more efficient and effective.

Information Gathering Tools

As we stated in the sections on your relationship review process and on questioning skills, the more you know about a potential or current client, the better your ability to communicate with them in ways that add value.

These days there’s a ton of information available online to assist with this.

Obviously, you’ll want to do Google searches for any contacts in your relationship target list to find out as much about them as possible. You’ll also




Want to check out their social media profiles, particularly Linkedin.

Follow them on social media so you can see their updates. This will give you more useful information about what it is they’re interested in.

For example, I used to follow and interact with the managing partner of a large law firm I was hoping to work with on Twitter. You wouldn’t expert a 60+ year old law firm partner to be an active twitter user, but I took the time to check and found that this guy was. By following him on Twitter I knew his favourite football team, food, wine, holiday destination.

And perhaps more importantly I watched as he tweeted links to articles he thought were good and topics he was interested in.

All of these gave me material I could use to keep in touch with him in ways he found valuable.

And, of course, social media is another channel you can use for regular “light touch” communications.

If some of your target relationships are active on Twitter, build a private Twitter list with them only on it. That way you can select to view tweets only from the people on the list so you can see what they’re doing without being overwhelmed by tweets from all your other contacts.


Organisation and Planning Tools


So-called “Social CRM” systems like insightly.com and nimble.com will allow you to automatically pool contact information from across your social media and see the all the activities of your high priority contacts without having to jump from system to system.

You should also set up Google Alerts for the names and companies of your target contacts. Doing that will mean you’ll get an email with details whenever they’re mentioned on prominent websites. Again, giving you something to talk to them about.

newsle.com (now free and part of Linkedin) will alert you whenever your Linkedin contacts

appear in the press. And mention.net does the same for social media mentions.

Organising Your Information and Planning

Your Activities

No review of tools for relationship building would be complete without mention of CRM (Client/Customer Relationship Management) systems. Just a few years ago these were heralded as the holy grail of relationship building, allowing you to keep track of and plan your activities and synchronise them across an organisation.

For small organisations and solo businesses, it’s worth being wary of the overhead that can be involved in maintaining a CRM system. As we've


http://insightly.com

http://nimble.com

https://www.google.com/alerts

http://newsle.com

http://mention.net


http://nimble.com

https://www.google.com/alerts

http://newsle.com

http://mention.net



said before, relationship building doesn’t happen behind a computer screen.

Personally, I’ve seen hugely successful relationship building programs driven through the use of a simple spreadsheet to track contact details, meeting notes and next steps. I’ve even seen one person manage multi-million dollar relationships just using a small handwritten notebook.

So keep it simple. Don’t get carried away with functions you don’t need and end up spending more time feeding the system than you do getting value from it.

Consider simple CRM systems like Capsule or insightly.com. Or consider a tool like Contactually

which integrates with your mail system and reminds you when you haven’t contacted some of your top relationships for a while.

You might also want to consider a tool like Sidekick, Yesware our Toutapp.

These tools allow you to track emails you send to your contacts to see if and when they open them or click links. Knowing whether your contacts have actually processed what you’ve already sent them gives you a tremendous advantage when it comes to follow-up as you can adjust your approach accordingly. Yesware and Toutapp also include email templating systems to send tailored versions of standard emails where appropriate.

https://capsulecrm.com/


https://www.contactually.com/

http://www.getsidekick.com/

http://www.yesware.com

http://www.toutapp.com

https://capsulecrm.com/


https://www.contactually.com/

http://www.getsidekick.com/

http://www.yesware.com

http://www.toutapp.com


My Most Important Advice


You may also want to consider tools like video or audio email tools. These allow you to communicate with your contacts in ways which they're probably not seeing from their competitors (although an even bigger differentiator these days would be to actually send a hand-written note via snail mail!)

Above all, remember that these tools are here to help and add to the real process of relationship building: human communication.

My Most Important Advice

The most important advice I can give to you about executive relationship building is simply to get going.

You don’t need to have high tech systems in place or to have mastered the perfect questions.

Learn as you go along. You’ll get more from feedback on your approach in practice from clients than you would from a dozen books on the theory of relationship building. So follow the simple steps I’ve laid out and get going fast.

Best wishes - Ian


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