How a company addressed the blind spots hurting business growth, by identifying and addressing critical client relationships.

From losing the top two accounts to securing the top 200 relationships. How a company addressed the relationship blind spots hurting business growth.

The going was good until it wasn’t. Overnight, this company lost their number one and two clients. Both were stolen by the same competitor, who had relationships with the top management and could sell a great story. “Never again”, the company promised itself. For this $700 m global engineering services company, the loss of the largest clients was a wake-up call and a symptom of a deeper malaise. The company had taken their decades-long middle-management relationships for granted, and relationship gaps were blindsiding them in these and probably all other accounts.

Doloop Digital’s Gaurav Rastogi helped this company rebuild their relationship health. A new executive leadership role was created to bring in more senior leaders to focus on CXO relationships. The account planning process was altered to incorporate a critical analysis of the relationships and influencers needed at the account for safeguarding and future revenue growth. These were added into the CRM, so the vertical business units could look at the number of key client relationships they need to build and the leadership bandwidth available to engage these clients. Next, each meeting was tracked, and the team was given explicit goals to increase the operational meetings and the “gift of ideas” meetings. At the board level, the company could now see the growth in relationship health and the number of relationship meetings happening across the company.

The client could now track the nearly 200 critical relationships across their top accounts. Steadily, the company can see that the executives are reaching out to build connections and meaningful relationships based on the power of ideas.

How are you safe from relationship blindside risk? Consider the following steps to secure your critical relationships:

• Identify key buyers, CXOs, and influencers at your top accounts who need to hear from you frequently.
• Prepare a gift of ideas for each meeting so the clients always look forward to their meetings with your team.
• What gets tracked gets done. Insist on tracking and visualizing the key relationships and conversations at a granular level.

Further learning. Contact us for Gaurav Rastogi’s “Building Relationships with Rigor-Resilience-Resonance,” a half-day “Ask Me Anything” conversation about your relationship risks.