Cultivate Business Relationships On Your Website

If your Website primarily serves a business-to-business (B2B) market -- for instance, if you're a freelancer selling Web development services to business customers -- you already realize that your clients are different from the average consumer. Your site may also have different objectives depending on the product or service you provide.

Cultivating Relationships - The Theory

To cultivate B2B relationships with your online presence you'll need to consider the following strategies.

1. Understand the differences between B2C and B2B relationships.

Business relationships are fundamentally different from consumer relationships. B2B relationships are primarily developed around the needs of a group, measured primarily by ROI and financial requirements, as well as increasing the company's capital.

In contrast, consumer sites provide entertainment, address the needs of individuals, and are primarily measured by enjoyment and personal wishes. While business relationships may contain personal relationships, their primary purpose is to serve the needs of a third party, and the individual who's making the purchase on behalf of the business.

2. Educate your visitor primarily in ways your product can help them.

Your B2B visitors come to your site to get something that will benefit them, and they're more likely to need additional information with which to justify the purchase than would a consumer.

Provide your visitor the information they need to make a decision, plus materials that will help them sell the idea to those who sign the check. Give the visitor what they need to convince others that buying from you is a good idea. How? By explaining the benefits of your product more than talking about your company.

3. Know the value of each of the key type of B2B relationship.

There are five key types of business relationships:

1. partner


2. employee


3. customer


4. community and


5. industry.

More relationship types may be available depending on your supply chain model or distribution relationships, but you should concentrate on these five first.

Know the needs of each type of business relationship as it pertains to the user's reasons for visiting your Website. If your site's purpose is to sell a product, then concentrate primarily on the "customer" and "industry" types of relationships.

4. When addressing multiple relationships it's important to address each type individually.

It's not practical to expect your visitors to go right to the pages that you have designed to solve their problems, so provide a simple path for them to get to the content they want. Develop site indexes that address groups of relationship types, and use navigation to guide visitors to the parts of your site that address their specific needs.

As a visitor navigates your site, the materials they receive should quickly get right to addressing their specific relationship type. Think of your Website as a sorting mechanism to lead visitors to the information they need, while categorizing them according to your site's purpose.

5. Create strong B2B relationships by providing your target audience what they want.

While visitors navigate your site, you should provide them exactly what they came for, without distracting messages. It is very likely B2B visitors are in the middle of all their own concerns, looking for a specific answer to a particular question they have. Help them get what they want first, and then make an offer.

When your site clearly conveys what your visitor needs in order to get what they want, they tend to come back. For this reason, it's important to align your site's purpose with the visitor's wants.

6. Focus on your target visitors' wants, and exclude everyone else.

As it takes effort and resources to design your site around a B2B visitor's wants, you should focus on only those visitors who advance your site's objectives. The targeted nature of business relationships necessitates getting right to the point.

Focus exclusively on the needs of your target audience, even if it means you exclude everyone else. This makes good business sense because these visitors are likely to engage your company. You should not distract your ideal visitors with extras -- focus on getting straight down to meeting their needs (after all, nobody says you can't have more than one B2B site!).

7. Tune your strategy to cultivate business relationships.

To start tuning your strategy, you don't have to change anything about what you are doing right now. Just begin to refine the way you communicate with your business-to-business visitor by trimming out the fat. How do you know what to trim? Contact and survey your customers -- ask what they would like to see on your site, and what they like about your site. Then contact members of your target audience, and develop a profile of what they want, need, and expect from the type of site you provide. Shape your implementation around the purpose of your site, considering each different method as it supports your business objectives.

These strategies will get you started on the path to successfully serving a business-to-business market. Remember, you don't have to provide everything on your Website -- just those things that support the purpose of your site. If you must, publish other content on other people's sites, but don't clutter your site with things that distract your visitor from their requirements and your site's objectives. It will only frustrate the business visitor and harm the relationship you're trying to establish.