How treating your customer by hosting corporate hospitality events can engender client loyalty and more sales for you.

Many of us running a business will have been invited to a corporate hospitality event at some point. Whether you have been invited to a charity fundraising event, received two tickets to the tennis or had lunch with a supplier you will have been exposed to Business to Business or ‘B2B’ marketing.

We all know that it is more cost effective to keep the customer we have than to engage with new customers. It’s also a far sight easier to cross-sell products to existing customers who have built up a relationship with your brand.

Keeping your best customers on board relies upon building up a strong relationship with them to stop them straying to your competitors because they feel loyal to you and your business. In simple terms, this means keeping in touch with your customers and moving your relationship away from a purely transactional basis to one of familiarity and ongoing dialogue. Creating partnerships with your customers will show them that you value their custom and can react to their needs.

The B2B marketing technique of corporate hospitality enables you to develop these relationships by taking them out of the ‘transactional’ environment. Through the use of corporate hospitality you can relate to each other much more readily as human beings and your customers can talk about their needs and decision criteria in a low-threat environment.

When engaging with customers via corporate hospitality the event should achieve a number of objectives and follow some rules. Firstly, the event should reassure the customer that they made a good choice of partner or supplier in you. The event should also be used to:

• add value to the relationship, above what has been contracted
• seek additional opportunities for further business
• inform business and client about new developments

Rules:

• Everyone involved needs to be aware that, even though the event may appear to be primarily social – or even casual – it is a shop window for your company. This is especially important for those staff members who may have limited client contact on a daily basis. You need to understand the importance of assigning your best people to attending and hosting the event – and as a small business owner this will typically be you!
• It’s equally important not to ‘sell’ all the time. Try and make your conversations a good mix of business and pleasure to influence your attendees. Make sure that if alcohol is involved that the conversations with customers are merely lubricated and not intoxicated.
• Finally, corporate hospitality is one of the most enjoyable aspects of rewarding your clients and customers for their business – and therefore the most important rule of all is to have fun!

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