Over the last 30+ years, I have had the privilege of owning, running and managing several franchise businesses; some iconic brands and others started from scratch: Recognition Express, Kall Kwik, ComputerXplorers and Techclean.
My background and experience are primarily in business-to-business franchising. In B2B, success relies on a franchisee’s ability to create, retain and build relationships with customers. Indeed, to my mind, a successful business is underpinned by strong and lasting relationships – a bit like a marriage!
Three little words
To build a successful business, you will go through three stages:
• Get customers
• Keep customers
• Grow customers
As the franchisor, our job is to support franchisees to achieve these three goals by providing intellect, tools and systems. It is a symbiotic relationship.
The stronger and longer the relationships, the greater the level of success for franchisees.
Show your customers some love
Relationships don’t just happen. Indeed, think about Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, for example.
Named after Abraham Maslow and published in a 1943 paper, the hierarchy of needs explains what drives human behaviour. In short, needs are categorised into a structure – often visualised as a pyramid – where more fundamental requirements must be met before individuals can pursue higher-level growth.
There are five distinct tiers: physiological needs; safety needs; love and belonging; esteem needs; and self-actualisation – the principal aim being to work one’s way through the various tiers.
While Maslow never explicitly employed a pyramid for his theory, many people nowadays do.
Now I’m going to replace the Maslow “pyramid” with my own pyramid of business development.
The tiers (working up from the base) in this case comprise prospect; customer; client; friend; lover.
• A prospect is a new customer, a potential buyer that you’ve identified and targeted.
• A customer is a person who buys from you now. Getting an initial sale and converting a prospect into a customer is a good step, but it is only the first step, and customers are often almost as cagey and wary as prospects.
A customer is not truly a customer until they have ordered more than once. A second order will give you more time to impress the customer. To get to know more about them. To understand what makes them tick. More importantly, you want them to get to know you, to want to see you, to start to rely on you.
Move the buyer from being a customer to a client
Customers become clients when they see the supplier performing consistently well; when the supplier constantly exceeds expectations. It takes away the hassle and provides solutions.
Taking a buyer up to client level is often as far as most people can go. Any further and they leave their own comfort zone. However, successful businesses and salespeople go just a little further and make that move from professional business relationship to a very personal relationship – from client to friend.
At the friend level, you know you are starting to develop and build a successful key account. You have overcome barriers like price, delivery expectations and reliability. You are now at the point of creating a higher level of understanding.
Of course, as with Maslow and his zenith of self-actualisation, our own pyramid has a peak relationship – that of lover. At this level, you are fully enveloped within the company and their decision-making process. While you may be “external”, you are one of the business’s few truly trusted confidantes.
You may never achieve the relationship of lover and, if you do, it will be with a very small number of customers. But the critical thing is to aim to achieve the highest level on the pyramid.
Just another supplier?
If you don’t have a level of intimacy with the customer, then what do you have? If you can’t share a joke, or a memory, or discuss the environment in which you both do business, then what are you? You are a commodity player – simple as that.
The businesses I’ve been involved in (and am still involved in) sell print and supply promotional products, business gifts and clothing.
So why have customers been buying from Kall Kwik and Recognition Express for over 43 years?
Trust me, it isn’t luck. And it’s not because we are cheap – because we are not.
It’s because we are responsive, we understand business, we are generally in the same vicinity as our customers and, most importantly, because we have some level of relationship with them.
Without the relationship, without a modicum of intimacy, without bringing our personality into the business, we become just another supplier.
Added value
Add in our experience, our intellect, our personality, coupled with a genuine interest in the customer’s business and the fact that we are generally local, and suddenly we can add value.
Becoming a franchisee with Recognition Express, Techclean or Kall Kwik rewards exponentially those people who are “people people”, who are good communicators, who value relationships and value themselves as being able to provide value.
It goes without saying, you must also be organised, ambitious and hardworking.
Digital has its place, but people still buy from people.
