Plant growing in the palm of your hand: How to build effective relationships with SMEs

Build effective relationships with SMEs

SMEs are a lucrative audience but their diverse nature means they can be difficult to understand. Robert Gorby, marketing director at Powwownow, offers five tips to improve your relationships with SMEs

Strong relationships have always been at the heart of successful business with SMEs. It is therefore important not to take these for granted and leave them at a superficial level. Investing a little more time to build deeper, longer-lasting relationships will guarantee return on investment is longer term.

Here are five steps for ensuring SME relationship satisfaction:

1. Local sponsorship

Sponsorship can mean many different things, with local business events and organisations providing particularly cost-effective opportunities to engage with local SMEs. However, just because an opportunity is there, doesn’t always mean it is worth taking.

As with any business decision, there should be a tangible and beneficial outcome for the company. Therefore, be clear on the target objectives before entering into anything and make sure you have the right resources available to fully support and promote the sponsorship. Don’t be tempted into ‘logo slapping’, or guilted into sponsorship out of sympathy. Take an option that will best fit with the SME audience, local enterprise, business hubs and awards are particularly good outlets.

2. Community engagement

In an age where attention is in short supply and brand reputation is important, building connections and credibility with the right people at the right time is highly valuable.

Social media channels and forums have become common tools for tapping into SME communities. They allow the identification of and engagement with specific audiences, such as industry segments, special interest groups or target locations.

It goes without saying the key to success when creating relationships through these channels (as with any relationship in life) is not to use aggressive sales pitching or to broadcast marketing messages. Instead, aim to cultivate meaningful relationships by contributing to conversations and becoming a useful member of the community.

However, above all, it is important to remember this is not where the relationship should end. With our increasingly connected world, it is perhaps now more important than ever to cultivate relationships past social channels, be it by phone, email or face-to-face.

3. Customer service

Traditionally, the responsibility for ensuring good customer service has been assigned to specific people. This should no longer be the case.

Remember, every touchpoint is a potential service opportunity. This includes everything from order placement and delivery to accounts and maintenance. Ensuring that service is timely, useful and pleasant will go a long way to creating positive feedback and repeat business. This is especially the case for SME managers, where ineffective service can be damaging.

It is important to remember when dealing with SMEs, you are working with the people within the organisation. Therefore treat this relationship as such. It is the personal touch people will appreciate and remember.

Take your time to develop relationships and avoid the hard sell. Look for small steps  you can work on en-route to achieving your final goal to prove your service value and reliability.

4. Targeted engagement

As people begin to expect the same levels of service from a B2B relationship as they do from a B2C, the boundaries between the two are increasingly blurring. It is also now not uncommon for a well-connected and savvy customer to have more product and review information than the associated salesman.

It is therefore important for businesses to employ smart CRM techniques to track customer data, behaviour and activities. This increased knowledge will help to better target the individual’s requirements and enable engagement on a personal level. This will be based on genuine interests and concerns and therefore maximise relationship success.

5. Brand engagement

Service and trust should be at the heart of any effort to build your brand with SMEs.

In order to achieve this it is important to know and understand exactly what it is the SME target market requires. The best way to do this is to survey, monitor and research. However, it is important not to simply take information without also giving something back to the community that you are wishing to work with.

In an SME environment where people often take on more than one role, any additional advice, content or deals you are able to offer to make things easier will be well received.

Local sponsorship, community, customer service, targeted and brand engagement are all avenues that can drive customer engagement and loyalty. Setting clear objectives before you start will allow you to enter into activity with focus, and address the interests of those you are engaging with.

 

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