Business Relationship Expert Jamie Shibley: Five Best Practices For Establishing Lasting Business Relationships

STURTEVANT, WI, UNITED STATES, March 25, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Your mother was right: handwritten thank-you notes and small tokens of appreciation do impress others with your thoughtfulness, and that is just good business advice too.

After spending 20 years in the corporate world and 10 more years as a services business owner, author Jamie Shibley believes the key to accelerating business growth and profitability is building strong emotional ties and loyalty in business relationships.

Her book, Relationship-First Strategic Engagement: An Agency Owner’s Guide to Greater Conversion and Loyalty, (2025, Indie Books International) explores the best strategic ways for business leaders to prioritize relationship development.

“What I want more than anything is for people to understand the feeling that comes with creating a relationship in which a person would go out of their way for you just because you acknowledge them deeper than they expected,” says Shibley, CEO of The Expressory, a strategic engagement agency.

In a study conducted by Audience Audit, 57 percent of advertising and marketing agency owners reported losing clients in the previous year.

“Agency owners wake up in the middle of the night thinking about finding enough time to maintain the business while also figuring out how to attract new clients, and not just any clients—right-fit, high-value clients,” says Shibley.

By cultivating a relationship-first strategy, an agency offers what clients crave—they want the agency to know them personally.

Shibley’s agency has created a trademarked methodology to teach clients how to find and maintain right-fit clients. The five best practices in the methods detailed in the book are:

Prioritize Your Relationships. To successfully implement a strategic engagement plan, it helps to start with one category of relationships. The main three types are leads/prospects, existing clients, and the ecosystem, comprised of everyone from your team and vendor partners to your strategic partners. Each relationship has a different goal, and your chosen strategy will reflect that.

Create Your List. Shibley calls the list the Dream 25 System. This focused approach advocates targeting no more than 25 prospects or strategic partners at any time. To effectively nurture the type of trusted relationships needed to convert new business, she says business leaders cannot manage more than 25 at a time with excellence.

Research Your Contacts. Merely having a list isn’t enough. The challenge lies in deepening your knowledge about the person behind each name. Develop the kind of emotional connections that come from continually showing your understanding of their world, validating what is important to them, and caring about them more than just a potential transaction.

Uncover Themes For Engagement. By finding patterns within your research, you bring to the surface components that are important to your prospects. It’s about understanding their “why” and all the things that cause them stress. Through this analysis, you will have the information you need to design touchpoints that resonate with prospects on a personal level.

Move From Insight To Engagement. A challenge that agencies and other service providers face is not knowing what to say or what to send to capture the attention of their prospects or strengthen relationships with existing contacts. This is when you want to showcase how much you want to help them, understand what’s important to them, and care. You’ll begin to design the touchpoints that you send to your prospects, strategic partners, or existing clients over the course of the year. These touchpoints should be both digital and physical.

Success with this method revolves around mastering all of these practices and the creativity and consistency of the sender’s touchpoints.

“Make sure that what the person receives sparks enough of an emotional reaction that it creates engagement and starts to develop a relationship or build a stronger one,” Shibley emphasizes.

When nurturing prospects or strategic partners, design seven touchpoints per year as a rule of thumb. These seven touchpoints should be sent about every six to eight weeks.

“If you’ve selected to nurture your existing clients, you’ll want two touchpoints per year,” Shibley recommends.

One of the most important but difficult steps is tracking the performance of each touchpoint. By documenting each interaction and its outcome, you can assess how your efforts translate into business opportunities.

“Remember, your prospects are likely to receive pitches from numerous vendors,” Shibley reminds. “You stand out by being a source of knowledge and support instead of spam.”

Shibley says when you care and show up as a helpful connection, you build trust, which is fundamental in the relationship-building process.

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