Jermaine Edwards shows how to turn client risks into growth opportunities. A compliance requirement becomes a chance to deepen relationships, a platform shift opens doors for educational support, and entering a new market creates strategic advisory value. The key: ask yourself, "If this risk were an opportunity, what benefit would we gain?"
Chapters
Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. We're still continuing our videos on being the expert to your most important customers. This is video 3 on opportunity. If you haven't seen video 1 and 2 on market and risk, I'd suggest you go see those now. You can get the links in the top right-hand corner. Come back and we can get started on opportunity. So let's think about opportunity. Now, what's really interesting here, if we look at previous video, video on risk, we talked about all the different aspects here in this particular column that an organization faces. The three specific areas of finance, compliance, strategy, operations. We talked about all these different areas that impact risk directly and how when an organization looks at risk, there could be some, some implications to that, both from a cost perspective, a loss of revenue perspective, many different areas like that. However, there are also opportunities that exist within those risks as well that customers can take hold of, but sometimes isn't always clear to them And us as the customer experts, those serving our customers well, we can come directly to our customers proactively and objectively looking at the marketplace with new ideas, insights that might help them take real opportunities from those risks that exist. So I wanna just walk you through some ideas and how we might think about that. So you can do that with your own customers as well. So let's start with this first area here of risk. So let's just imagine here that this risk over here, over here is something that is regulatory. So a regulatory risk that's taking place. Maybe you're in a financial services industry and a government has said, actually, from now on, you need to verify all of the customers' data that you use on a quarterly basis. Now that's a huge logistics and huge, um, challenge for any incumbent longstanding financial services industry to come up with that data on a quarterly basis. For a, a bunch of customers, particularly if you have thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of customers. However, what's the opportunity here? Well, actually, what it can mean— you can say, well, this might be a great opportunity for us to build and deepen our relationships with our customers. So how might we do that? So instead of looking at this as a particular risk, we might say, actually, let's find ways to deepen relationships here? How can we deepen relationships in this area? So how can we turn this risk into an opportunity for us directly? How can you move from a potential regulatory risk here of more compliance and more work in something that actually drives the relationships with our customers? That could be one opportunity. A second thing here, let's look at this specific area. This could be around changing customer needs. Maybe there are some things around digital that the customer— maybe your customers are moving from one particular platform on social to another and actually are communicating with you more, but you haven't quite made the real commitment to make that move. And maybe your customers, uh, are looking at their own customers and saying, well, we don't actually know how to do that. Well, maybe you as an organization, maybe you can actually provide some education for your customers. Actually, you can go in front of your customers and say, hey, we're going to provide some real valuable, insightful education for our customers that may be having challenges with moving to more of a digital area to serving the needs of their own customers. So we're gonna provide some really strategic education that allows them to make some good decisions so they can capitalize on the opportunity that exists within the risk of not being able to respond to those customer changes. Another part here might be the way in which a customer goes to market. Maybe they go in, they're going into a brand new country, country, and you're already there. You maybe you've been established there for a long while, and you say, well, actually, well, why don't we provide some introductions or give some insight reports? Why don't we provide some insight for the customer here? We're already there in that marketplace. We know what happens there. We're serving some customers. Let's give them some insight on what specific things they may need to consider. Where are the, the right places to go, where the right places to set up? How can we make some introductions for them? How How can we move this risk of going to market in a new place and some of the things that carry with that to providing opportunity for our customers to get real strategic insight? Now, these are all things that you have the power to go proactively and do. You've moved from market understanding all the different impact points, the changes, the strategy that is involved there. You've moved to looking at the risks that might come under those categories of financial, of strategic, and looking at operational things. And now we're looking at how we move those risks into opportunities for your customers. So here's how we do that. It's really simple. We look at the risk and then we ask ourselves, if, if this risk were an opportunity for us, what kind of benefit would we gain? If this risk was an opportunity for us, what kind of benefit could we gain? And what will happen is creatively With your customer, you can do this exercise and come up with some really creative ideas and actually look within your own business and see how you can add value or create new value for your customers. So inside the workbook, I've given you a really specific guide on how to turn all the market risks for your customers into opportunities. Now I've just given you a gold mine here. If you can do that, identify the risks that are there with your customers put that into that document, and then present it back to your customer, there is no doubt that they will see you as the expert. So go ahead, download that guide, go through the whole sequence of exercises, and know— I'm pretty confident that once you do those exercises, you'll feel confident and equipped to do the work that matters with and for your customers, because you have now become the expert, and I'll see you in the next video.
