Build Long-Term B2B Clients With These 4 Expectation Setting Tips

Expectation Setting

Growing your business often means hunting for sales. It can take a lot of time and effort to attract and secure a new client, especially in the world of B2B sales, but their patronage is the lifeblood of your organization.

But once you’ve done business with your client and provided a superior offering do you find that your client has lost interest in your new business relationship? The fault might lay with poor expectation setting.

Within this blog I will share with you four tips on how to set customer expectations that will allow you to build long-term relationships with your B2B clients.

1. If you can’t do the job then don’t take the job

Accepting work that your solution or offering cannot satisfy is a recipe for failure. You may be tempted to accept such work, seeing it as a short-term transactional win, but ultimately the relationship will fail. A failed relationship will sour any possible future engagements with the client and cost you future dealings with other prospects through the generated negative word-of-mouth. Turning down work that you cannot satisfy at the moment keeps the door open for future relationships and helps establish a level of trust.

2. Don’t over promise results

When trying to win a new B2B sale from a prospect, you may highlight your offering’s best recorded results in order to impress your prospect with your solution’s potential. If it is not explained clearly that the results shared are a sample of some of your larger successes, the prospect can quickly become dissatisfied through the mismatch of the expected performance from your solution and its actual results. If you want to win business but help ensure a long-term successful B2B relationship, be sure to highlight your success but be open with your prospect about the average results experienced by your current customers.

3. Explain the timeline

Whether the timeline represents how long it will take for your company to perform and complete work, or how long it will take for your offering to show results, explaining your timeline to your prospect is an important step in setting expectations and eliminating misconceptions. As an example, imagine you provide a tool designed to grow your prospects newsletter subscribers by two hundred percent. During the sale period you failed to explain to your new customer that it will take approximately six months to realize the solution’s full results. Unbeknownst to you, your prospect mistakenly believes that your tool will get the promised results in just one day of implementation. Even though your tool is performing exactly as designed, your failure to explain the timeline has resulted in a dissatisfied customer through mismatched expectations.

4. Stay in contact and report progress

For B2B service providers or organizations dealing in sales that are not one-off transactions, it is important to maintain communication with your client and report important progress. Regular communication with your client allows you to monitor changes in their satisfaction and reinforce accurate expectations. Updates on progress are also important to show the effort undertaken for projects that require a longer time to complete. Here at VA Partners, some of our updates include when we arrange meetings or demos with the prospect, when we follow up on the information shared, when we collect feedback, and when we have secured the sign off on the required paperwork. Keeping your customer abreast to developments allows them to understand the time needed for the results. Be sure to check out our former blog on tips for setting expectations with clients.

By effectively setting and managing your customer’s expectations, you help to build a long term and profitable B2B relationship with your client. Apply these four tips to help you manage your prospects expectations and keep the business that you have worked hard to earn.

Now that you are armed with these four handy tips, check out our Introduction to Startup Sales white paper.

Build Long-Term B2B Clients With These 4 Expectation Setting Tips