Collaborative business relationships and marketing can help you become recession proof.
Are your business relationships recession proof?
We are still in the midst of a recession with no real end in sight – worrying about many things, including how to retain, maintain and develop new business relationships with our customers, clients and business partners.
Collaborative Marketing
For most businesses trying to keep their business profitable can depend to a large extent on how good their marketing and business relationships are with their customers and clients.
If you are not taking care of your business relationships by communicating, giving value in the form of information, products and services, dynamically collaborating and innovating to create new value, then either they will find someone else or someone else will find them and the business relationship is lost!
Collaborative marketing will help you understand the lifetime value of your business relationships and is one of the key activities to help you prioritise your business relationships. There are many types of business relationships, some are just one off, transactional whereas others maybe joint ventures and formal partnerships.
All business relationships involve varying degrees of time, effort and money but all involve being able to market collaboratively and effectively.
The people in your business who are involved in developing and maintaining your business relationships vary in capability and maturity. They have different roles and responsibilities depending on which function they belong to whether it is marketing, sales, management, R&D, product managers to customer service.
Collaborative business relationships and marketing it is key to your business. Each has a part to play both from your customer perspective and within your own business. Having the correct skills and capability that are aligned and mature plays an important part in your business relationships.
Collaboration – the 80/20 rule
In support, having the correct tools, systems and business processes which need to be adopted and used by all stakeholders is an essential component if your business relationships are to create mutual value for all parties. From a technology perspective there are many systems you can choose from and their marketing would have you believe that they are the answer to all your problems.
However, collaboration is about people working together to deliver an agreed outcome. Therefore, creating collaborative business relationships needs to be viewed using the 80/20 rule – 80% is people and 20% technology.
A collaborative framework
When people have to work together, developing a model or framework is a useful tool for you to use.
It can help you to easily share your ideas and process with other people in a visual way. This helps to overcome collaboration barriers such as different languages, cultures and ways of working. But having a framework is not enough.
There needs to be supporting guidelines, processes and tools to help you take action and implement the framework. Having a framework specification that provides a communication tool backed up by how to do it through the logical phases and stages of business relationships is required to help you navigate your way through and beyond this recession.
ISO 44001 (BS 11000) – a collaborative framework specification
ISO 44001 (BS 11000) collaborative business relationship is a framework specification that you can use no matter how big or small you are, to identify, create and maintain profitable business relationships.
Central to this and your collaborative marketing is a Relationship Management Plan (RMP) that you can use at a corporate level for your business and with specific projects and business partners/customers.
Online Collaboration Relationship Management Plan
Typically most of your business relationships are in different locations and time zones.
Creating a “collaborative umbilical cord” with your customers, clients and business partners can help create a more interactive and dynamic relationship. To be able to deliver information, support and services both physically and virtually in an easy online way will differentiate you against your competition, helping to make your business relationships recession proof.
Online ISO 44001 (BS 11000) Gap Analysis Workshop
Discover how you can enhance the value of your current business relationships, develop your Relationship Management plan and collaborative marketing based on ISO 44001 (BS 11000), to help you develop new and recession proof business relationships, by simply requesting your complimentary workshop.
This 1 hour online ISO 44001 (BS 11000) collaboration gap analysis workshop will help you identify the gaps in your current business relationships and become more recession proof .
Just click Start below, leave your details and click Submit
Keep on collaborating
Jason
