Minimize Relationship Risk

• Gaurav Rastogi
• 25 Oct. 2016

My Mom still thinks I’m a cute cherubic kid with the sweetest smile, while my kids think I’m a cultural relic, not plugged into the latest apps. Just pick up your phone and look at your iTunes top 25 plays. If you have more Beyonce and less Madonna, you’re likely more current in your selection of Pop. If your iTunes playlist has nonstop 90s, it’s likely that you’re out of sync with today’s musical tastes. (Some might argue you have no taste at all in music but, hey!, the 90s were dismal).

"Times change, but people’s opinion of us doesn’t change as fast as we want it to."

Early in my time leading sales transformation at a large global SI (Infosys), we used to joke about carbon dating. No, not finding your piece of carbon on Tinder. The other kind, where you can find the age of an archaeological object by studying it’s carbon contents. We found that when our service mix was evolving rapidly, in the early 2000s, we could tell when the client was signed by the mix of services they had bought. The older the client relationship, the more retro the service mix tended to be.

If your company launches a new offering every two years, labelled A-through-E, if the client Acme Inc was 80% A, 10% B and 10% everything else, we know this is an old-old relationship from the time when A was your only offering. If client Zbigniew Worldwide is 50% C, 30% A, 10% D, and 10% others, we know that this client is of relatively recent vintage. That’s carbon dating. It’s not precise, but it’s pretty telling.

DIY tip: Go back and look at your top clients and run this study yourself. What's your carbon dating?

Just put your top accounts into an Excel, pop in the year the relationship opened, and then mark the product/service mix that you currently sell into them. Also mark the year that product was launched in its present form. Now, look at the chart for your top clients and see what patterns emerge.

Change is coming fast.   Tech and tech-services companies can't keep up with the change in today's world already. A few years ago the Cloud computing and Mobile were on fire. Then came Big Data. Now it's Digital or AI.

"Change is coming at us fast, and tech companies have to keep pace"

From this chart (from The Economist) you can see that the pace of change has accelerated, and now you need to pivot more frequently and dramatically than a decade ago. It's bad enough to keep your product offering updated, but what about your relationships? Are you continuously reintroducing yourself?

Trying to reintroduce yourself is uncomfortable.   No one wants to be uncomfortable— neither the client wants to touch a good thing, nor do you want to try on a message that you haven’t used before. Plus, your entire relationship team has to be in on it. The Account Manager has to know the new message and be able to talk to it with passion, the Executives that come into the QBRs have to be able to tell stories about their new offerings, and the website has to represent the latest positioning in a non-threatening way to existing clients of older products.

It’s very uncomfortable— no wonder companies try to postpone this to the last minute or beyond.

But you have to do it.   If you don’t reintroduce yourself and show the new offerings, the client is going to find someone else who can do it. One you have let in a competitor, you have lost two opportunities to reposition yourself, once before the competitor was called in, and second when the clients wants to know how you are better than the competitor who is now inside their company. At that point, no amount of charm is going to make the new competitor go away. Whether you like it or not, you will have to reintroduce yourself to your best clients continuously.

The rewards of better referrals, easier access to new business and lower risk of client flight are all worth the discomfort.

If your relationship is showing signs   of aging, you are at increased risk of being upended by the next wave of change. The new waves are coming in faster than they used to. Carbon date your clients today to see which ones need you to reintroduce yourself.

In a later post I will talk about how to go about reintroducing yourself to your oldest clients. Well begin the change deep inside ourselves, and talk through a storytelling primer. It’ll be fun.