COMMENT AND OPINION | Paul Crow
PAUL CROW OPINION
The Ripples MD believes good relationships are crucial to the success of his business. He advises looking after suppliers and understanding their needs, and treating customers as if they were your mother’s friends
‘People make the single biggest difference’
I
To succeed as an independent retailer, you need to have good relationships with everyone you come into contact with – anyone that is part of the
process of offering and delivering value to your customer
’m not a big fan of the term people buy from people. I get it – you’re unlikely to buy from someone that you don’t like. But I would
argue we all frequently do – especially if they are saving us money.
In some cases, we are even buying from faceless entities that exist only on our screen. We all know that it’s not as simple as having a nice person in our sales team. To succeed as an independent retailer, you need to have good relationships with everyone you come into contact with. Your customers, their neighbours, your team, your suppliers and any third-party contractors – in fact, anyone that is part of the process of offering and delivering value to your customer, as it is this that keeps them out of the local competition and away from internet sellers. Relationships matter, full stop. Looking after your supplier, and treating them with respect, is the minimum required of anyone in business and I put my money where my mouth is in this regard every day. Going a step further and investing your time and effort to understand them is also the smart thing to do. What are they trying to achieve, how can you help them? These basic questions can help set out a blueprint of agreed objectives that you can link to your own. Right now, we need all the help we can get and by being resourceful, and including the supplier as part of your team, you can include them in part of your success, too. All suppliers have a rather unique perspective of knowing the customer base better than we do. We should identify our favourite customers and try that bit harder with them. People always sell to people, right? That’s not one you hear very often, but it is just as valid. Visiting a supplier’s head offi ce or factory takes time and it is often time that you don’t have. Understanding
their team and how you can make their life easier will usually lead to that little bit of extra attention that can help you in everyday life.
I saw a post on LinkedIn from a retailer about how poor manufacturers’ representatives were and, ultimately, if you were one of those representatives, you would not have been that pleased. I’m not sure who that helps, but perhaps with better dialogue, service level agreements that manage expectations and just plain old relationship development, such comments could be avoided. Relationships with customers are even more challenging. After all, you can’t reason with unreasonable people, and we all get a few of them. Our preferred method is to treat them like “our mother’s friends” and smile like we mean it. We like to walk them to the door and hold it open, offer them cakes and biscuits with their coffee and spend quality time getting to know them. To understand their individual requirements means we have to be able to ensure that they communicate openly with us. It’s a lot easier to overcome an objection at the end of the sales process when they don’t feel uncomfortable about telling us what it is. We put a lot of work into developing relationships with our customers and in our experience the further you get away from owner-occupier businesses, the more formulaic and automated the service becomes. Promoting this fact must now be key in any marketing plan and promoting the names and faces of your business is just as important as stating what you do. Installers are not excluded, either. At Ripples, we don’t employ or subcontract installation, as we prefer to introduce our customers to local specialists that we know will do a good job. Theoretically, therefore, we should be able to just hand out business cards and be done with it, but that doesn’t work for us and never will. At some point, these installers will need our help because they have an issue and you can also be sure that sometimes we will need their help, too. Either way, if we work with them, as if they were part of our team – treating them fairly, listening to them, understanding how we can make their jobs easier and educating them on how they can help us – then we usually fi nd the smoother the bumpy bits are.
So whoever you are working with, the formula is the same. Perhaps rather than relying on the old-fashioned, but well-intentioned, adage that ‘people buy from people’, we can instead recognise that people make the single biggest difference to our business and that is something that independents, more than any others, should know how to relate to.
• See our special focus, pages 37-48 16 · November 2020
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