Harvard Business Professor Peter Drucker said, "The function of business is to attract and maintain customers."  In my experience working for a Japanese company I learned that attracting and maintaining customers is a high priority for their top management and sales executives.  Building and maintaining relationships with customers is something of an art form.

In order to reach the point at which a Japanese business can even begin to make proposals Japanese sales people in business to business activity plan to spend at least three years building a relationship.  The reason is very simple, they must build trust with the prospect and demonstrate that they can provide value to the customer.  They spend considerable time getting to know their prospects on a personal level.  And they understand up front that winning business cannot be a priority until the trust level is high enough for their target customer to begin to ask for their help.

Japanese business people take a long term view of the business relationship.  In the West, we view a long term relationship as perhaps a period of five years.  For the Japanese time is infinite and relationships are not viewed as long term unless they extend beyond 20 years, at least.  Clearly, the Japanese focus on building and maintaining relationships is taken from a different cultural view than that of Western culture.  However, this approach explains the dedication and success that Japanese businesses have demonstrated in recent years.

Trust is a valuable commodity in business.  Not only is it valuable in the client/customer relationship it is also critical in the company employee relationship.  Unfortunately, this is an area where many companies are falling short.  A recent article in "Corp!" magazine (www.corpmagazine.com) reports on a 2010 Global Workforce Study by Towers Watson in Michigan.  The study data revealed that only 47 per cent of workers think that their leaders are trustworthy.  The result is that "employees expectations are falling while their stress levels are rising."  The study also revealed that almost 40% of employees "remain either disenchanted or fully disengaged [and so] a large group of people ... are not working up to their potential."

If employees do not trust their management and are disengaged what impact does that have on building the customer relationship?  Bill Marriott, CEO, of the Marriott Hotel empire said "Your employees will treat your customers in the way in which they are treated."  If employees lack trust in their managers it is highly likely, therefore, that these same people will not place a high priority on building trust with your customers or clients.

In today's highly competitive business environment a lack of trust can have far-reaching effects on building external customer relationships as well as that of internal customer relationships.  The challenge, then, is to build trust in order to create an environment of where everyone feels secure in doing what they must to meet the company vision and mission and to build customer loyalty that will provide solid long term income and profit.