Building Relationships in a Virtual World

The picture at left is of my front walk south of Boston. It shows what happens when you choose not to shovel after a big snow and then it melts and freezes. I have put a load of salt on it but as you can tell it didn't really work.

As I attempted to skate/stumble through this mess this morning with my dog, it occurred to me that this could also be a metaphor for nurturing your pipeline, especially in a virtual world.

In my past at IBM, I spent a lot of time roaming the customers' halls and created a lot of opportunity and made many friends a long the way. Obviously you don't have this luxury when you mostly sell virtually.

In the virtual world, you have to work hard to create and nurture relationships and multiple touch points with your prospects and customers because it won't happen naturally or by mistake. You have to add value to these relationships by understanding your customers business and by being able to understand and help solve their problems.

Some tips to do this:

1) Use the news: Try to read through the headlines each day for business news as well as sports news that is relevant so that you have fodder for your conversations or better yet a reason to call or email someone with an FYI or how would this affect you email, even if it is just to congratulate them on the college team they follow winning their conference.

2) Get specific: Follow your target verticals or industries. Educate yourself and again reach out to customers with relevant news to ask them what they think, how it affects them or better yet with ideas how your product or service might be able to help them with a problem.

3) Get more specific: Try to to read the news on the specific companies you do business with everyday and use this for context in your meetings or again, better yet, a reason to reach out by phone or email. I use RSS feeds for this because it is impossible to keep up with any significant number of companies without it. I also use Google Alerts to follow companies. I recommend doing this for your own company as well to see what people are saying about you. Your prospects will Google you before you talk again.

4) Follow your ecosystem: If your company is aligned formally or informally with other companies follow them as well to help you find leads or again to give you a reason to reach out. For example, my company's product automates the creation of contracts. It works particularly well automating the documents and contracts in the sales cycle like NDAs, business cases, proposals, SOWs, and sales contracts and we have reduced our customers time and expense in this process by up to 70%. We also are integrated with Salesforce. So I follow Salesforce.com's press. And, recently, a large potential prospect of mine announced that they were committing all of their sales people to Salesforce. I called the person in the article and lo and behold, I now have a great opportunity for 2009.

So what does this have to do with shovelling? Well, shovel every day. Shovel when it snows. Don't wait for something bad to happen like rain, a bad economy or really cold weather because then it can be too late. Create a cadence of contact. Build your relationships and work hard to add value to your customers by bringing them information and solutions every day. 

Good luck.