BUILDING LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS

Building long-term relationships:

Jamie Martin, Chick-fil-a Advertising, and Campaign Team

Jamie stressed the importance of “Building relationships.”  Her experiences as an Account executive requires strategy and managing client relationships.  The best way to increase advertisements for a company is to create emotional connections with the people that are influent in the community, ad campaigns, employees, and products.  There is short-term turnover in an advertising agency, but these are the focal businesses that help build sales through media and advertising.  Tactical promotion is key.  People and the culture of an organization are also important to job happiness.

“Marketing is very colorful.”

Great service innovations are sometimes the best ideas.  The importance of reading people and knowing when you meet someone’s needs is something that is learned through time.  Continuous education should also be a goal of anyone trying to grow in a company.  Take a  look at your boss and ask yourself if you want that?

The company collects customer information at every point where it contacts a customer-sales, loyalty programs, surveys, direct mail advertising, sales promotions (contest and sweepstakes) and affiliate programs with florists, credit card companies, and airlines, and uses it to create customized communications and product offerings for each of the customers in the database.  A sophisticate4d segmentation system that analyzes transactional behaviors (recency, frequency, and monetary) and combines it with gift-buying behaviors.
Before a relationship can be mutually beneficial to both the firm and the customer, it must provide value to both parties.  Creating this value is the goal of customer relationship management, which is a business philosophy aimed at defining and increasing customer value in ways that motivate the customer to remain loyal.
Customers
Employees
Supply Chain Partners
External Stakeholders
“acquiring customers to maintaining customers”
Relationship capital- that stems from the value generated by the trust, commitment, cooperation, and interdependence among relationship partners.  Customers must become true believers or sponsors of the company and its products.  In consumer markets, build customer relationship is to increase the firms share of the customer rather than its market share.  Abandoning the old nations of acquiring new customers and increasing transactions to focus on more fully serving the needs of current customers.  Financial services example.  The relationship in product offerings.
80/20:  The ability to track customers in detail can allow the firm to increase sales and loyalty among the bottom 80  percent of customers.  The goal is to rank the profitability of individual customers to express their lifetime value.

Developing Relationships with Business Markets

The goal is to move business buyers through a sequence of stages, where each stage represents an increasing level of relationship intensity.  Bound to their supply chain partners.  Relationship capital: One firm maintains a loyal and committed customer, the other maintains loyal and committed suppliers.  Relationship development in business markets can be more involving, more complex, and much riskier than relationships in consumer markets.

• A change in Buyers and Sellers Roles
• An increase in Sole souring
• An increase in global sourcing
• An increase in Team-based Buying Decisions
• An increase in Productivity through better integration

Building long-term relationships:
Quality and Value:  Keys developing Customer Relationships

The current article addresses the fallacy of salespeople’s unethical practices of lying to clients.  In the SMM survey, about half of all salespeople lie to clients.  One such New York-based startup sold multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns to some of the world’s largest companies.  Yet, the sales force lived by such mottos as “If you didn’t like you were fired” or “It always came down to careful wording and fudging numbers.”  Salespeople are driven to lie in order to achieve sales targets instead of focusing on what the customer really needs because companies demand that reps make quota or be fired.   “Some companies do whatever it takes to make money.”  These lay than affect many aspects of client relationships.  One such employee, Matt Cooper, received death threats from a client that didn’t get what his salesperson had promised to the client.  The dishonesty of a customer relationship eventually ensures a company will have zero customer loyalty.  So Cooper decided to sell only what he knew worked because he couldn’t lie anymore.  A manager can tell if a salesperson is lying by getting calls from customers, repeat business being down, salespeople being motivated by fear, recognition, and rewards being based solely on numbers, and managers/executives lying too.  Cooper was being poorly managed.  Yet, sometimes it is the executives themselves that promote deception.  The SMM survey showed that respondents believe salespeople who are caught lying should be disciplined, but 51 percent have never actually punished anybody.  Another way to safeguard managing your team is by making smarter hiring decisions.  “The best predictor of future behavior is looking at past behavior.”  Finally, Cooper found that building relationships with clients is a better long-term strategy in both terms of financial well being and financial health of the company.

The article is applicable to what we have been talking about in class about developing a long-term customer relationship and creating a sales strategy.  The key driver of a sound sales strategy is that the leaders of the organization exhibit the values that they want employees to follow.  Effective salespeople are communicable, honest, and maintain customer follow-up to build customer rapport.  Salespersons need to be customer-based instead of company-oriented ultimately to achieve desired long-term customer relationships.  Trust components that we have also discussed in class factor into the ethical questions of this article.

I Personally feel that lying to customers is unethical.  If a salesperson really wants to develop a good relationship with someone, they need to instill trust by not lying.  People that I personally talk to as salespersons in the real world that lie make me want to have no relationship with them/do business.  I also agree with the argument that managers need to instill a sense of honesty in their team.  People follow by example and teaching good business practices leads to good business actions

“Be Genuine, Don’t Over Professionalize.”

Final Thought:

“Know what you don’t know.”

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• • Heineken: U-code (ibelieveinadv.com)

• • Chick-fil-A planning restaurant near Lindale (business380.com)

• • OnMessage a Winner in 27th Annual Healthcare Advertising Awards (prweb.com)

• • Social Media: Advertising аnd Promotion Parallels (digitalbrandmarketing.com)
  • Chick-fil-A Debuts Holiday Season Promos (thedailymeal.com)

BUILDING LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS: