Brian Hill and Matt Handal connect to each other in this intriguing post and reply, resulting from my posting about the problems of e-letter marketing last week (and republished in today’s Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter).
I respect both points of view — but especially appreciate Hill’s latest comment:
What really matters is results. To me, the only business relationships that matter are ones that are mutually beneficial. Not everyone would agree with me – lots of businesses thrive from taking advantage of others. But the bottom line is that there needs to be quantifiable results or the relationship is worthless.
In practice in sales, we sometimes find senior sales representatives coasting on their “relationships”. They’ve built their accounts and now they say they are “cultivating” their connections — so they don’t really worry about focusing and developing new business through assertive cold calling and business development initiatives. They often reach a comfort zone, only to fall flat on their faces when some eternal force or event (or their boss) yanks their relationsh9ps away from them. (The classic example of this sort of thing happening is when a bean-counter takes over the sales operation, sees the “established relationships” and then figures a much cheaper junior rep can service the existing accounts — blowing the senior sales representative away. This usually proves costly to both the sales rep and the company. Maybe relationships are important, after all.)
I agree with Handal and Hill that relationships are measurable and if you don’t measure your results you really cannot assess your marketing effectiveness. Of course, you need to measure the right thing. But that is another issue for another day.
