Building business relationships

Stephen Holgate explains why building lasting business relationships is like dating and how the same rules apply to gaining new clients.

Building lasting relationships in business is a lot like dating; not the aimless dating you might do in your early twenties where it’s more about the journey than the end result, but the kind of dating you do when you want to find ‘the one’.

In order to secure this kind of business relationship, you need to first get a meeting with the senior decision maker, and then convince him/her to listen to you and, in due course, trust you with their business. The ideal outcome of this is that the company becomes a client of yours and continues to buy from you into the future. Much like with dating, there are certain steps you must follow in order to secure that end result.

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