Business Is About Relationships

What’s business about? Is it about branding, sure. Marketing, absolutely. What about selling, yes.

But all these things lead to one thing - relationships. Business is about relationships. Doesn’t matter whether you’re selling products or pitching services, ultimately people buy because they trust you. And trust comes from developing a relationship - even if that relationship is built from content on your website.

Whenever I think about my business, I try to remember that people do business with people, not businesses. It’s people who buy and they buy from people. Hence, business is all about relationships.

No where is this better illustrated than in the Cluetrain Manifesto. Yeah, I know it’s been around a while but it’s the benchmark for understanding business as relationships. Here’s a clip:

…After hearing (about ‘markets are conversations’), he acknowledged that our observations were astute, but also incomplete. Something more was going on in markets than just transactions and conversations, he said. What was it?

I said I didn’t know. Here is the dialogue that followed, as close to verbatim as I can recall it…

“Pretend this is a garment”, Sayo said, picking up one of those blue airplane pillows. “Let’s say you see it for sale in a public market in my country, and you are interested in buying it. What is your first question to the seller?”

“What does it cost?” I said.

“Yes”, he answered. “You would ask that. Let’s say he says, ‘Fifty dollars’. What happens next?”

“If I want the garment, I bargain with him until we reach an agreeable price.”

“Good. Now let’s say you know something about textiles. And the two of you get into a long conversation where both of you learn much from each other. You learn about the origin of the garment, the yarn used, the dyes, the name of the artist, and so on. He learns about how fabric is made in your country, how distribution works, and so on. In the course of this you get to know each other. What happens to the price?”

“Maybe I want to pay him more and he wants to charge me less”.

“Yes. And why is that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You now have a relationship”.

Their conversation goes on to talk about the importance of relationship in public markets. “Transaction still matters, of course. So does conversation. But the biggest wedge in the social pie of the public marketplace is relationship. Price is less set than found, and the context for finding prices is both conversation and relationship. In many cases, relationship is the primary concern, not price.”

So in creating your business, in running your business and in marketing your business, you want to make room for relationships. You want to remember that it’s people who buy. And it’s through building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships that you can build long-term business success.