Stakeholder Mastery - Engage and Wrap Up

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. In this video, it's video number 4 of 4 of the Stakeholder Mastery series. And if you are just seeing me for the first time here, I suggest you go back to video number 1 on identifying, or video number 2 if you've seen it already, on verifying and validating, or video number 3 before this on communication and positioning your communication with your most important customers or contacts. In this video, we're wrapping things up and we're talking about how do we engage effectively and to really kind of consider how you're going to manage that relationship moving forward with all the communication and contacts that you have. So now I'm talking about communication. We have this TFR areas here, and this is really, really simple. And things you may have considered in the past, perhaps you even do now, we're going to bring those things to your attention. So the first piece here is to track. We want to make sure that we're tracking the engagement that we have in a very consistent and concurrent way. And you may have systems already in place to do this. But here we want to track frequency, and we also want to track responses. So here's why this, uh, is important. So with frequency, we want to make sure that we're actually gaining and we have the consistency of frequency of communication that we already set in the previous video around the timing, role, and outcomes, and obviously the messaging. We want to make sure that the frequency is actually coming back between you and the customer, that you're keeping on track with those areas. If you aren't, if frequency is going down, then we know that something's going wrong here. We need to address that fairly quickly to ensure that you're moving forward in the relationship and you're meeting the expectations with the customer. The other piece here are responses. So we're tracking responses. So what is actually happening between you and the customer? Just note down what are the responses. How, how quickly is your customer coming back? How quickly are you getting back to the customer? What's getting in the way? How are you responding? What does that look like? Document those things, making sure that we're tracking those things that matter. The frequency— is it going up or down? Is remaining the same, and also responses— how we're thinking about those different areas. That is tracking. The next piece here we have is around follow-up, and follow-up is really, really important. In fact, it's fundamental to every single aspect in business— partnerships, sales, definitely with customer management. Now, 4 areas to really effective follow-up— and in fact, I don't really like calling it follow-up, but essentially for for the sake of understanding a common term, we're going to use this. So essentially, we here, we have every follow-up needs to be intentional. So we need to know exactly why we're doing it, right? It needs to be valuable to the other person. It needs to be future-focused. And it needs to be collaborative. So why these things? Well, essentially, for every time you call the customer, just because we've communicated and agreed something doesn't mean they'll be enjoying the conversation or want to have it. They're going to have pressures on their plate. They're going to have things that are occupying their mind their mindshare of things that they need to do. So whenever you approach a call, you want to create the environment, the experience that every single call with you is worthwhile. And so it cannot be just a follow-up to say, oh, how are things going? Uh, did you get my message? Did you get my email? That is boring, mundane, and adds no value to anybody. So when we call, we want to be really intentional. We want to make sure it's highly valuable for the person. We're talking outcomes, and not just activities. Needs to be future-focused, as in, hey, where are we going next? How are we going to do this thing? And how do we do that together? So it needs to be collaborative actions that are shared between the two of you so you have greater engagement with it. That's all about the follow-up. And then we have the last piece here, which is around the review. The review is so, so important. So once in a while, you're going to sit down with the customer or the contact and just have a quick check-in to see Hey, how are things actually going? So what we want to do in this review piece is you want to review the results. So what have we actually experienced so far? What are the results? And then what are the challenges that we've faced? And then lastly, what are the actions that we need to put in place? Ideally, what needs to stop, start, or change, or remain the same? What things are actually working What are those actions that we might need to consider? So we want to think about the results, we want to observe and be aware of the challenges, the things in the way of the relationship, and then we want to determine some specific actions. So when you look at the entirety of the whole Stakeholder Mastery process, you see it's very methodical, it's very thought out, it's very intentional. But the result of being able to go through this process is you have more control now much more visibility, and you can have more confidence that you can manage these relationships at scale, personalized or non-personalized. You'll have the ability to be able to have confident, compelling, and results and value-led conversations that your customer will want to participate in because of the way that you've approached it, because of the way your, your mind has been reframed to manage these processes. So you've gone through all 4 videos. You've looked at identifying, verifying, and validating, communicating, positioning that messaging with your most important contact, and now we've looked at engaging, managing the whole process for stakeholder engagement. Now you are officially a stakeholder master. Download the guide, do the work, and I'll see you next time in one of my Stakeholder or Mastery series.