• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 5, 2008

How often do you sit back and think about the relationships you have?

I do it quite a bit. Your friends, your family, your boss, your peers... whether it be a business or a personal relationship, the strongest ones thrive based on the same simple principle: it is better to give than to receive. A selfless attitude is an effective way to approach a relationship, and in business this is especially important. The best sales or business development people are those who take a genuine interest in you, identify areas of common interest and can help you to succeed and achieve your goals -- all before they ask you for a dime. It goes back to a principle I have mentioned before: listen before you speak, but in this case I am emphasizing listening with true interest rather than just to check it off your list. The opposite of this attitude are the people who beg: they beg to be on RFPs, and they beg to be in the consideration even though they know the chances are slim to none of getting on the buy. These folks are never effective.

Even at an industry level (especially in Web 2.0) the strongest companies are those that provide a consumer solution first, before they intend to generate value from those same consumers. Google was the forefather of this model, and YouTube was the biggest successful example in recent years. Both companies went to market with a selfless solution and then retrofit a revenue model, reaching critical mass before they became corporatized.

This selfless perspective can be hard to maintain. People can easily overlook it because they get hurried, they get stressed and they start to focus on the daily deliverables and the business milestones they're scheduled to achieve, so much so that they forget about the people and the relationships that are much more important to them in the long run.

Relationships are at the core of our business and can be a deciding factor in media planning, agency selection or being included in any sort of recommendation. A strong relationship will likely encourage your peers to give you a shot or to test out your ideas, even if there are competitors in the marketplace who may offer a deeper, more experienced solution. Our industry keeps growing and more dollars are coming into digital than ever before, but where those dollars will be spent relies heavily on relationships, probably even more so than the simple data and research available to the marketplace. Research data can be massaged and made to say whatever you want it to say -- but a relationship will typically stand the challenge and assist in the closing of a sale or an opportunity.

Call it karma, call it "The Emotional Bank Account," call it what you will, but it's been written about and taught at seminars and conferences -- and no matter how much we hear it, it is never enough. When you enter into a relationship from a selfless perspective, you are destined to succeed! Too often you can find examples of people who reuse and rehash their personal Rolodex to the point of burn-out without any genuine concern for the value they are bringing to these relationships in the first place -- and by the time they figure it out, it can be too late.

You've heard of "not burning bridges." The principle typically refers to situations when you leave a job and are told not to cross the people you used to work with. The world is a small place and you never know where someone will turn up in your future. The sales rep you spurn during a meeting could end up being a reference for you in your next job. The assistant media planner you treat with curtness and disrespect may end up being the client lead in five years. The intern you work to death just might end up being a serial entrepreneur with intelligent ideas and the will to make them work. By not treating these simple, daily interactions with respect and a selfless attitude, you can find you do more harm than good to yourself in the long run!

This may feel like a little bit of a touchy-feely column, but in just the last month I've seen too many examples of people who overlooked their relationships and took advantage of the people around them, to a point where it was detrimental to their careers. They take, take, take and never offer anything in return. The irony of it is that when you do take advantage of these relationships, you'll rarely know until much further down the line when the relationship is beyond repair. So start early and often, and be sure to take an objective look at the way you treat your daily interactions.