Mark Rutter says that business comes down to a simple equation: If you help your clients be successful, you’ll be successful.
The president and CEO of GROUP360 Inc. led his company to post $40 million in revenue for fiscal 2009, an 18 percent increase from 2008. The marketing communications firm’s growth in recent years is linked to the fact it listened to customers’ needs and restructured into a single-source provider of creative services. The new value proposition has clients like Anheuser-Busch Inc. and Johnson & Johnson saving money and getting products to market faster.
“Helping an organization or an individual achieve their goals is probably one of the most important things that anybody can do,” Rutter says. “You can’t do that unless of course you do understand what the clients’ needs are, and you can’t understand those clients’ needs unless you can build some relationships with people so they can openly and honestly tell you what they think their organizations need.”
Smart Business spoke with Rutter about how to build customer relationships.
Get to know your client. Without question, you can’t really understand what someone else needs or some other organization needs unless you know about them, you know about their history, you know about their problems, you know about their success, you know why they do what they do. In order to do that, you really have to get to know the individuals that run the organization.
You would do that through a variety of different relationship-building processes ranging from just communication, lunch, seeing them in their environment. You can even do that on a golf course. Any way that it would be useful to listen to them and see what their needs are would build that relationship.
I think the best way is face to face. It’s interesting that in our business we have a variety of ways to communicate for our clients, ranging from the advertising, design, photography, building point-of-scale displays or trade shows or events, all those are ways that we use to help our clients go to market and become more successful. But when it comes to building a relationship the ideal way — if you were a big company selling, let’s say, soap powder, you would still be talking to the user of that soap and making sure you understood their needs.
The same thing holds true with us talking to our clients. As long as we can talk to them directly and have two-way communication and make sure that we listened to what they say, that’s the best way to build that relationship.
Ask clients about their past and future to better understand their needs. You can just ask a question like, ‘Where do you think your organization is going? What are the obstacles that keep you from getting where you want to go? How will you know once you get there that you’ve arrived, and then what will you do?’ Those are all open questions.
First of all, you would just ask open questions that will elicit a response that will be having the client, in essence, tell us their story. If they can tell us their story … we learn all about them, and we also learn that their story is different from somebody else’s story.
There’s a desire in business to quantify people into groups and say the demographics of this group are this or that. I think that sometimes is misleading because people are really uniquely different and organizations are also very uniquely different.
So the better you know them and understand who they are and what they stand for and where they want to go, the better off you can serve them.