Bonding with clients over hardship?

One of the challenges of modern day client servicing is to keep to clients interested and constantly engaged. In today's marketplace, clients come and go quickly. Sometimes it may just catch you off guard. How do we maintain these relationships? We hardly get to ask them how is their experience with you until something happens. Sometimes it might be too late if its negative. Especially so in the Asia culture where we tend to keep to ourselves.

The way to get around this, in fact is to create compelling B2B relationships with them. Delving deeper into the client relationship which is not much different from your social relationships, end of the day they are still people. We sometimes draw the line too quickly. There are no excuses these days, companies big and small to not engage your business partners.

We all know how some hardship really digs deep into us. They are both memorable and compelling, at times life changing. I still have not gotten over how my uncle Eddie looks like in his last days. It reminded me how fragile life is and how important it is to lead a healthy life. We all long for certain hardship experiences to stay away or kept as reminders. They are powerful markers in our memories.

However, hardship with positive outcomes produce the same memorable and compelling effect. An example would be doing community work, participating sporting events together like a triathlon or marathon etc. I know of a certain design agency that trains and compete together with their clients in a triathlon. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fast-company-staff/fast-company-blog/radical-collaboration-triathlons-are-new-golf

These experiences are hard to forget, going beyond great boardroom or killer presentations (yes, they are still important). They create solid anchor points for both your clients and you.

So the next time you are deliberating on how to engage your clients. Try doing hardship stuff together where the experiences truly bind. Hope you can leverage on these to create great business and personal relations.

Leong