Law of Reciprocity Definition: A principle of returning a favor to someone who has helped you before.
We all love receiving gifts. It’s human nature. The more personalized and catered that gift is to us individually, the more warmth and connection we feel with the giver of that gift.
Now we can’t all go around handing out bow-tied gifts to every single one of our prospective clients. But we can give them something that’s very unique, something they have never seen before, something that they will remember.. A BizGift™ card.
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” – Aesop
Instead of viewing our prospective clients (or our current clients) as dollar signs. Successful business people know that business is nothing but relationships. And the best thing you can do for your community, your country, your business, and your wallet… Is to nurture those relationships.
The problem with the traditional business card is that it doesn’t convey to your prospective clients how much you value that relationship with them… More on that here.
We tend to focus more on the money and less on the person.
That’s not an easy nut to crack… However, there are some best practices that you can embody when talking to a new potential client.
1. Add value first.
2. Ask questions and listen actively.
3. Ask them how you can help them achieve their goals.
4. Give more than you get (yes this includes $$ at first).
We often become myopic within our business. We believe we are one-size-fits-all. We are the end-all and be-all. We are the solution to every single person’s problem. This is just factually incorrect and virtually impossible.
I used to run a pressure washing company. We focused on delivering a very robust customer experience. Our goal was to “white glove” every one of our customers. We charged a lot of money for this service, which led us to work with a very specific type of clientele. I learned what we were good at as a company, and I focused all of our attention there.
Heck, that’s why I’m writing this blog. I’d love for you to discover the magic that is passing out an individualized, completely customized BizGift™ card. But maybe it’s not your cup of tea. And that’s fine too. I hope that this article is useful to you either way.
As I said.. Add value first.
Now, let’s be honest. We aren‘t great at this.
We tend to ask questions and categorize the answers in our preordained belief structure of who our clients are and what they want. I receive quotes from all sorts of vendors for both personal and business all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I receive a quote and have no emotional connection to it. I have very little brand trust in the vendor because they failed to listen to what my concerns are–they failed to hear why I reached out to them in the first place.
Active listening is where you ask a question and you shut your mouth. We need to approach our prospective clients with the mentality of “I don’t know what they want or need, but I intend to find out.”
Let’s view our first meetings with our prospective clients as discovery.
We all tend to focus on how our clients can achieve our goals.
Gotta hit this quarter's numbers?
Looking to “get the deal closed” by Friday?
We fail to ask ourselves, “what are our client's goals?” and “how can we help them achieve those goals?”
Maybe we can’t.
Maybe we aren’t the right company for our client. And that’s okay. I love Strawberry Ice Cream, but Big Ice Cream knows that I’m just one consumer of billions–so they made Moose Tracks, Chocolate Chip, Mint, etc.
But if we can help our clients achieve their goals. Let’s make sure we are making that the focus. We tend to focus on our needs over their needs. It’s a poor mentality that is self-serving. It is NOT how you build long-lasting, customer-oriented relationships or businesses.
I have a confession, I spend too much money on buying other people’s lunches. I can’t help myself, and it’s a natural default of mine to take someone to lunch and to buy their meal for them. I have no idea what the R.O.I. has been over my entire career… But I can assure you, those measly meals have planted more seeds, opened more doors, and progressed my career forward more than any other single networking tactic I’ve done.
That’s a big claim. I know it is.
You’d be amazed at how intimate, open, and honest it is to share a meal with someone else. It removes walls, breaks down boundaries, and opens people up to receive you better. There’s a reason why executives wine & dine with one another. I once read a story where a man flew to Japan to renegotiate his contract with a large firm there. He was going to be in Japan for a week. When he arrived, they picked him up in a hired car. They took him to extravagant meals. Amazing concerts and shows. They bought him expensive liquor and put him up in a high-end hotel with a view of the entire city. They probably spent $10,000 on this guy for a 5-day stay in Japan. The amazing thing?
He forgot why he was there.
It just was lost on him. He was lost in the luxury that was provided for him. Whenever business did come up, the Japanese businessmen discouraged the conversation and swayed it back to something light-hearted and easy. It wasn’t until he was getting into the limousine with the rest of the executives on his way back to the airport, did they begin to renegotiate the contract.
He ended up having to close the deal in the 30 minutes until he arrived at the airport.
He walked away with a non-favorable deal. The Japanese businessmen played him. They focused on giving, they focused on building a relationship, and lastly they used the constraint of time against him that he failed to negotiate a more favorable deal for his company.
Now, I’m not saying that you should apply this practice. Nor am I saying that every client of ours needs to be wine & dined for $10,000. What I am saying; is that focusing on giving before you make your request is a far more important component of building strong relationships, especially in business.
That’s why we created BizGift™. We got sick and tired of people throwing away our business cards. We wanted to give people something that they valued because we simply want to add value to your life.
Get started today.