Business is quick to focus on the next dollar. It’s a transaction-focused approach that’s always looking for the next sale.
It’s kind of dehumanizing.
In the book Love Leadership, John Hope Bryant talks about a different way of approaching business: “There are much better ways of selling than selling.”
Relationships over transactions: He emphasizes building long-term, two-way relationships instead of short-term, one-way transactions.
“I learned through trial and error that if I treated my business partners and clients as transactions and not as relationships, I would get that one sale, but not 20. There would be no customer next year, and my business wouldn’t be sustainable. If, in contrast, I treated others the way I wanted to be treated, I learned that they actually wanted to do business with me more, they trusted me more, they were more loyal to me, and they had more confidence in me.”
John Hope Bryant, Love Leadership: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World
In action: It’s something we summarized for Evolve Workplace in a blog post sharing networking tips.
This approach requires a long-term view, and it means sharing and looking for opportunities, not just walking into a meeting with your hand out.
Why: “When you take the time to build relationships with people, they are concerned about you, and you are concerned about them. You are ‘bound up together in a mutual destiny,’ as Martin Luther King once said.”
I think it’s a better way of doing business.