28 June 2024
Julie White, managing director of D-Drill & Sawing
Quite rightly, companies across all sectors will always have a sharp focus on winning new business. Bringing in new customers is crucial to growth.
However, while I would always strongly advise at looking to broaden your client-base, don’t ignore potential opportunities with customers you already work with. That’s where relationships are key. Somone once said to me that the best piece of marketing you can do is the work you carry out for customers and the way you treat them throughout the job you are doing for them. That could be a long-term contract or a piece of one-off work. If you prove that you are a great business to deal with and you get the job done, they’ll come back to you again and again. They might even recommend you to someone else too.
I took over D-Drill from my father, Peter, and he was the master at building strong relationships with customers. It was in the days before emails, the internet, social media and mobile phones so it was always a personal touch – letters, face-to-face networking and attending events – that ensured he got to know the people he was working for and that stood the business in good stead. Also, crucially, the business delivered what it said it would.
The world is different now but personal relationships are still key and I will always maintain that people do business with people. No amount of technology will change that.
We can get to know customers through social media and we can stay in touch on email too but it’s still about building genuine relationships and it is making sure the whole team understand your company’s values and displays them at all times.
One important factor to think about here is to never assume that your client knows everything you do. They might utilise you for one service but you might have dozens of other services that they’d buy from you if only you told them. If there’s one thing that makes the leader of any SME’s heart sink it’s when a customer says: “I didn’t know you did that!”
At D-Drill & Sawing, we’ve added a host of new services over the years to make ourselves even more relevant to our clients so that they can use us, in some cases, as a one-stop shop for concrete scanning, drilling, anchoring and pull testing.
But they only know that because we’ve told them and we can speak to them in a way that shows we’re offering a service rather than it feeling like a sales pitch.
That is why relationships are key but, not only that, it makes doing business so much more enjoyable when you get on with people!
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