Podcast Episode #11: Relational Influence

Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an Irreplaceable Advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide, your Your journey starts here. Welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast.

My name is Jermaine Edwards and I'm your customer growth guide, and this is episode number 11. And I say this each time, every week, I really get excited about exploring some really interesting, sometimes difficult, topical, controversial, undervalued customer topics today. And today I want to speak about an area that we we all really value as customer professionals, and that's relationships. And we're going to talk about the value of thinking through the lens of what I call relational influence, and we'll come to that in just a second. But it's really important that we first of all get a view on what we mean by relationship development. And so I want you just to imagine for a moment that a loyal customer for 15 years, and you get a call from this particular customer This customer is worth $50 million to you, and they say to you, "We're pulling out of our contract. We're moving to a new company. We're already signing the agreement." What first comes to your mind? I imagine it will be surprise, total shock, and complete awe. You didn't see this coming, and your customer had been considering this for over a year. And you didn't know. This is the story of many organizations around the world, not necessarily $50 million, but definitely this kind of surprise and awe, and it often comes from this mistaken identity of the relationship, of believing we have something when we actually don't, because we're relying on convenience rather than understanding the true nature of commitment and what holds relationships together, the sequence in which we need to see things happening for us to have more confidence over time that that truly is real, and we can actually grow and deepen and really get maximum optimization from that relationship that gives value to both people. Now, actually, the story I told you was a real one. The $50 million, the call saying we're pulling out of a contract was a real organization I worked with, and I'll come back and tell that story in just a moment. But being familiar with our customers is great until it's not. Because if we're unwilling to ask the hard questions and to check, familiarity will become complacency and a false sense of security, or even contempt, that we know something and we believe something to be true and we know it will be true always, but we're never willing to really ask the harder questions to our customers to find out where the relationship actually is. So we have to work on customer relationships to examine the relevance and value value to both you and your customer. And this is why relational influence is so important, as its application will build deeper, more trustworthy, profitable customer relationships. And using relational influence, you have the power to apply the right level of effort and your engagement and execution to grow your access, your influence, and relevance with any customer. Then any connection you have with a customer, you'll be able to increase the perceived advantage and benefit of the relationship. So we need to stop relying on just relationship building tactics like building rapport and showing empathy. We know these things to be true because they've worked, and we know that they work. However, relationships are getting much more complex and diverse because of the range of channels we have to communicate, and so the way in which we do that is shifting dramatically. So to get to understand this, there is something that we've begun to explore called the Six Relational Drivers behind relational influence, and the best way to apply relational influence is by using the Six Relational Drivers. So before I get to that, let me just explain what I mean by relational influence or relationship influence. Now, relationship influence really is your ability to systematically and repeatedly connect with your customers at any level, enabling scale to effectively deepen trust and confidence. So it's your ability to systematically, repeatedly connect with your customers at any level, enabling you to scale and effectively deepen trust and confidence. So wherever you are with anybody, you're able to systematically, repeatedly deepen trust and confidence at scale for as long as you're delivering the value suited and valued, sought after by that customer. So let's explore this some more because this may sound like an overly complicated statement, or perhaps maybe it's too linear, but it is actually very intentional. And everything we choose to act on with our customers must be clearly defined as possible so we can measure the result of our effort. So, an important note here: what I'm not saying is that we treat our specific relationships as systematic, protocol-driven, you know, very tactical actions. That's not what I'm saying. Some of those things will be tactical in, in different situations. However, what I am saying is that every relationship we have in business is always H2H, it's always human to human. We should never forget The people that we work with are people. We're dealing with people, not titles, numbers, stakeholders, and just partners in other categories. These are people. And as a husband of 14 years going on 15 years, 6 kids, multiple businesses, and extended family, customers, communities that I work with and for, I know I cannot be random in my desire to nurture those relationships, which is why I have to be systematic. I have to be very intentional with how those those things are put together. We have to design for the relationships we want and begin to think through the practices that will get us the kinds of results that are beneficial for us and also those we engage with. So ideally, just going back to this definition, we want our relationship activity to be systematic, meaning easy to use and gives us a predictable result, It needs to be able to help us to connect at any level, so transferable to anyone, anywhere, able to scale, impacting people you may not be able to see, and deepen trust and confidence, so increases your personal and organizational reputation. Now, I'm not saying that this is some sort of overnight tactical thing. This is something that happens over time. I'll just get it out there in the open. It's going to take a little bit of time but you can have some immediate wins, and that's what we're going to explore in a moment. But this is what relationship influence is all about. It's one of those three pillar practices of exponential customer growth. Relationship influence is a huge component to that. It's one of the first things I teach when working with organizations committed to serving their customers. So sequence actually matters. The way in which we approach our relationships matters. And, you know, among some of the most cited studies, hundreds of such cited studies that I've researched and looked at on relationships, relationship psychology, and places like the Gottman Institute and Psychology Today, there's a very well-known within the, the field of psychology and social psychology, a man, a PhD professor researcher named Mark Knapp. Now he's fairly unknown to the wider public, but known to the institutions. And he's known for his deep work in nonverbal communication and developing relationships. And he studied something which I found really fascinating, perhaps the most helpful one of the studies I've come across, called Social Relationship Theory, or the Social Relationship Model. And it outlines the steps that we all go through in building healthy thriving relationships and how they can really deteriorate over time regardless of culture, experience, or personality. So on careful evaluation, it really turns out that Knapp's framework can help businesses directly map customer relationship development. It's really helpful that way. If you look at closely, you can use observable and measurable behavioral traits to proactively respond to your existing customers. Now, just imagine that, being able to see how healthy a customer relationship is and know almost immediately what to do to change it. This is the power of understanding the psychology of relationships, then applying that knowledge to your customer relationships immediately. So, we have this whole idea of the Social Relationship Map, the model, the sequence in which things happen. We know we want to be systematic. We know we want to have our activity connect, connect with anybody. We want to do this at scale. We want to deepen trust and confidence, right? So how do we go about doing that? Well, this is where the Six Relational Drivers come in, and powerful relationship builders always are intentional. They invest wisely, they personalize what they do, and they observe deeply. Okay, so Here's what we're going to do with these 6 relational drivers. The first of the relational drivers is trust, and trust is broken down into 2 categories here. It's much broader than this, and I actually have a very unique blog on this, an article called 7 Universal Trust, um, Trust Behaviors, and you can read that in the show notes as well to go a little deeper. But the whole idea is that with trust, we want to know what our customers may need to see consistently and personally view to know that we're somebody who is trustworthy. And so we break this into, like I said, what we call trust criteria and trust triggers. And trust criteria is what your client needs to see, and that's to know you are someone who's trustworthy. And trust triggers are the things that you can activate based on the personal corporate views and values of a client. An example would be— a trigger will be you being able to demonstrate with somebody that you truly understand how they feel. That is a trust trigger. That person now, in knowing that you understand what their perspective is and how they feel, will automatically assign qualities to you as somebody who is trustworthy. Whereas a trust criteria is something that somebody imposes as a value towards other persons. So for example, if we know that this person really values high levels of communication in terms of grammar and punctuation, and you share something that doesn't meet that standard, the criteria they have for trust, which really is wrapped up in the whole idea of competence, And this is shown really powerfully in the book The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey, or Stephen M.R. Covey, I should say. We have this confidence issue that sometimes gets in the way, the, the imposed criteria that somebody has to really view whether or not you are somebody who is competent, and that impacts trust. So trust criteria and trust triggers, that's number one. The second Relational Driver is Expectation. So these are the agreed practices, values, or behaviors that define the tasks and circumstances and decisions you make together. So let's just break this down a little bit more. So it is, it's very difficult to move a customer or anyone for that matter to a new place that neither you or your customer can see. An expectation helps you to see what the other person does because you've both agreed what it is that you do together. An example about this is just really in any kind of relationship that is serious, particularly a marriage. If you have clear expectations between you, you'll constantly be frustrated. You'll be the one, you know, looking over the shoulder of your husband or wife because they haven't cleaned something correctly. The expectation hasn't been communicated clearly, clearly communicated— if I could speak here— clearly communicated to the other person. Therefore, it builds up resentment and bad feelings between two people. And so if you aren't really crystal clear on the expectations that your customer has and you have of them, you're likely over time to build up resentment and not have the healthy or very healthy relationship at all. So that's expectation. The third relational driver is risk. So we want to manage the risks created by, you know, very different things— emotions, markets, operations, competition. There's so many different things that really getting in the way of us viewing the relationship that we have, particularly from your customer's perspective. So eliminating risk is about the identification and the removal of appropriate and manageable risks that impacts how our customers relate with us. And so we can do that by really thinking about the overall landscape of where a customer is, their market, what's happening within their business, their department, their career trajectory, what, what kinds of things might get in the way of them and us having a very fruitful relationship. We can understand that, we can apply specific measures in place to enable us to think about this well. I talk about this a lot in my book, The Key Account Hack. The third, I should say the fourth area is motivation. So why we do the things we do matters. So we need to understand the needs of our customers and provide them what they really want, those things that motivate and support what they do. So in all honesty, we still haven't really been able to nail this fully. If we really think about the way in which we view motivations of people today, it's, it's reviewed across a range of different disciplines from, you know, social psychology, neurological, mathematical, economic disciplines to study the impact of our choices daily. And no one's really got a huge hold on this. We've got some, some really good principles out there, but no one's really grasped this fully. And so there are ways in which we can get a broader understanding that gets us closer to understanding what lies beneath in our customer relationships. And one of the most popular ways to really think about this is through the work of the Hierarchy of Human Needs from Abraham Maslow. And I like the way that Tony Robbins, the guru himself, has really thought about these particular areas. He breaks it down into 6 core areas, 6 human needs. That support almost all relationships. And if you look at those 6 needs, you'll recognize that you can think about those areas and ask yourself, how do we use this to our customer's advantage and to our advantage? So we can do 2 things. We first need to think about what it is that motivates our customer, their organization, the people that sit in particular decision areas? What motivates them? What is the common thread that exists there? Begin to really think about what drives that and begin to dig deeper. Is it around certainty and assurance to avoid something or gain something? Is it significance? Is it connection? Is it growth? Is it contribution? Is it something much more than that? We can use these different parameters to build into our conversations So we can create much more meaningful engagement around their motivation that supports them and the relationship. Then we have honesty, this is number 5, and no one likes information that is hidden from them. So even if that information is hard to hear, we need to be the ones communicating it. So always communicate the truth in a wise and considered manner to be accurate about any situation. This doesn't mean pouring out everything on your mind. I mean wisely considering what you say. It's a great example of this actually came from a customer service rep named Alfie. Really proud of this guy. And a week earlier in his job, so a week, a week into his job, I should say, after doing some training with him, he had this particular conversation with the customer. And the situation was this: he was being put under pressure to give an answer for a delayed package. It wasn't his fault, it was just something that happened. The business had really failed this particular customer, and the customer was clearly upset. And he then, you know, could respond in particular ways. He could say, "Hey, this is not my problem," or, "Hey, we'll just get back to you." But that's not what he said. What he said was to the customer, "You're right, Mr. Customer, we've let you down." The customer was completely taken aback by that response. Alfie then began to explain the exact process to solving the problem, what he knew he could promise, and nothing more. The customer left not necessarily 100% satisfied but was so impressed with the way his call was handled They declined the refund that they were offered and provided feedback that the company needed to hire more people like Alfie. So amazing thing there. So even out of a customer not necessarily being 100% satisfied with the outcome but pleased in how they were treated, they were able to still raise the relationship equity by radical honesty, of being really clear, wisely considering the things that really supported the relationship. The last part here is challenge. So consistently demonstrating full engagement with the customer, showing you always act in their best interest. So courageous challenge is all about how you lead yourself, your client teams, and colleagues, so there's always mutual and your collective consistency in the relationship. And this means leading your customer and leading from a place sometimes of vulnerability where what you say may not be what they want to hear. And you may be doing things outside of your best interests, but in their best interests. So challenge can be counterintuitive. But what I mean by challenge is simply demonstrating true care. And when we care about people that we have, we're willing to challenge the things that we see so they get the benefit from it. So if your customer is not taking action on, for example, on something that they say they care about, tell them what you see. And, you know, a radical example of this came with a company I worked with who fully embraced this whole idea of challenge as a core driver. And the company had sold a very expensive large engineering machinery to a customer. It gave this customer so many different advantages in their market for using this particular engineering. And the customer that had bought it literally had the technology, the engineering, sat unused for almost 8 months after purchasing it. So the company knew if they didn't do something, their customer would come back at renewal time and just say, "Hey, we don't need anything else. We didn't get value from this," because they simply weren't using the tool. So they sent a letter to the customers, to the CEO of the customer, saying they'll be taking back the machine they had bought and returning their money minus depreciation. Now, the letter went on to show the amount of revenue lost through the customer's non-use of the engineering, and that they didn't want the customer to take on any more of the cost of ownership if they were not committed to the result. Now, this is a bold move. Took real guts, but it paid off big. CEO wrote back thanking them for the insight as he did not know the full cost. Within weeks, the machine was in use and the CEO consulted them a year in advance on the next purchase. So not only did the relationship build greater equity and trust with the CEO, but actually the challenge caused the customer to see that this is 'somebody they should be working with long term and was willing to commit to purchase products a year in advance.' Amazing stuff. So when you think about these different relational drivers, I'd encourage you to read into the detail on this in the article, but what we need to take into account here is that we need to remember that all of these specific areas that we have These, these different drivers are meant to be used also independently, but also specifically collectively together. And what I mean by collectively, we need to be thinking intentionally about how we can apply these things on a weekly basis. So how does that work with this $50 million account? So this $50 million customer company had this specific problem. And to them, their customer no longer felt the value in the relationship. Now, using the same filters of the relational drivers, we actually identified all the unaddressed risks to the customer, the uncertainty in the future, their motivation, their feeling undervalued, and the unbalanced communication. Trust had really been eroded. Their criteria for that particular company had been broken. Well, once this was understood, we were able to craft a very creative and personalized approach to their customer, and the result was they retained the customer while building a future collaboration, even after their customer had signed with another company, with a competitor. We're still able to bring back the relationship now in a different format, but they're able to maintain a $50 million account. That is the power of getting the qualities of relational influence into your business today, and I'd love to help you figure that out if you'd like to talk about it. But other than that, you can dive into the content a little bit more inside the article for more details, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you liked or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.