No matter what kind of business you have, the relationship between the business and the client is number one. Without clients and customers, your business wouldn’t exist. As a consultant, you come into organizations taking on a variety of roles. Sometimes you are selling services, sometimes you’re a project manager, and sometimes you’re adding a technical touch. The job of a business relationship manager is an extremely important one. If you head into an organization that is hurting in their relationship with clients, you have to go in and wear that hat.
The job of a business relationship manager is simply to make sure that the relationship between client and business remains good. The goal is to make the clients happy. Go take them out to dinner, build the relationship, and take care of any problems that may pop up. As a business relationship manager, you are maintaining and cultivating real connections. For this role, you need a person who can go in and be calming, entertaining, charismatic, and likeable. This is business management to the extreme.
The person in this position is taking knowledge and skills to promote a productive relationship between every facet of an organization. This includes the relationship between all different departments in one organization, their business partners and other companies they collaborate with, and the customers and clients. It requires finesse and it is absolutely necessary to get the entire machine to run smoothly.
This role is not a project manager, but the person in this role has to have an understanding of each integral part of any given project. This is the person holding all of it together. This is the person maintaining those relationships to keep conversation, planning and implementation productive.
This role will obviously vary from one organization to the next. Clients and customers are different. Relationships and company culture are different. The inner workings of each business are going to vary. The person that fills this role has to be flexible. A consultant may be a great choice to fill this position, because they are used to coming in and dealing with different relationships across different organizations.
How integral do you think the role of a business relationship manager is to a company? How do these roles change from business to business? What is a main trait that a business relationship manager needs to hold? Would a consultant be a good fit for the role? Comment below!
