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Your business's reputation is the greatest factor determining the long term success of your business efforts. Your reputation is remade each day with each customer who encounters your business. In fact, you have not one business reputation, but many reputations which are created in the minds of people who meet you in the daily functioning of your business movements. You must realize that it is vital to understand that you have a reputation among people who have had no contact with you but learned of you from others.

Joan Jett wrote a song from the old days that is called 'Bad Reputation.' Joan was a famous rocker of her day, but she was also a cunning marketing person. She made herself as the bad girl of rock, and the song 'Bad Reputation' was a great success. In the ever nonconformist scene of alternative rock, a woman glorying in her bad reputation was a hot commodity. She likely fibbed a little when singing 'I don't give a damn about my bad reputation' as she in fact cared a good amount about her bad reputation, it was one of her best marketing advantages! She used that image to gain immortality.

Unfortunately for most of us, a bad reputation is not a viable marketing goal to grow our business. The only exceptions outside of musicians might be trial lawyers, repo men, or bail bondsmen who are, in a way, respected for their aggressiveness and sometimes abrasive personalities. For the average person it just doesn't work.

You need to be very aware that everything you do, and everything your employees do, in relation to your business contributes to your reputation. No Mulligans exist in business. You can attempt to make things right that might have put your business reputation in a bad light. Really, remedying issues appropriately can be an opportunity in disguise. However, you can't change the memory of things that have caused someone to regard your business negatively.

Each encounter with people in your business has one of three outcomes with your reputation at the core. Of these outcomes, two that are not pleasant, the other one is wonderful!

The first one is an experience you have with a customer, or potential customer, in which you don't do anything really wrong, but you also don't stand out from the next company. You may not think this is the worst outcome, but it isn't far from it. At best, you've managed to be listed as ordinary in the mind of a customer. You will likely be either forgotten in the future, or thought of as someone that 'did OK' last time.

Result number two takes place when you, or your employee, has screwed up something badly enough to make sure the patron is really mad at you. It can get no worse for your business. Along with chasing away a patron, you have made certain you have also lost those who learn of your business through that client. There is no way to calculate the full damage that will occur. If you as a business owner are aware that you have allowed this to happen, then you deserve the evil to come. However, a great many times the business owner is oblivious to what has transpired if the problem occurred with one of their employees, or out of their personal interactions with the customer. You can't assume that disgruntled clients will make time to inform you what transpired. Usually they simply never return and no opportunity exists to remedy it. If you do become aware of the problem, but don't correct it, then again you deserve the poor reputation it makes. However, if you take the effort to go try to fix the problem, you will have employed a wonderful chance in business - to reassure a patron that you value their loyalty and are willing to do what it takes to demonstrate concern.

Result number three is what every business owner should strive for in every interaction with clients. You want to win over the clients, and potential clients, that besides supplying top-class goods or services, you have a concern for how those products or services fill a need of the customer. It is about establishing a trusting relationship with your clients so that they know you will never fail to meet their needs. If you accomplish this goal you can trust that you've cultivated a loyal customer who's value goes way beyond any purchase they may make today.

Helping you learn to create such loyalty in your customers is our goal. Hopefully if you are interested in developing your business based upon our tactics you will give serious consideration to registering for our services.

Visit BizRave Inc. for more articles and information about customer relationship based markerting to grow the business of your dreams.