Vital Data Elements for Effective Relationship Management

When you ask Key Account Managers (KAMs) to show you the relationships they have in their account, they most likely will show you some form of organization chart. Sophisticated KAMs have annotated those graphs with additional information about the people involved. Usually showing this information is accompanied with the remark: “It is a bit out of date, but I just did not have the time to update it yet. Things are changing so fast in this organization”. A sustainable up-to-date view of your relations in a complex account starts with having a more granular view of the data elements you need to describe your relations allowing for more flexible faster updates.

The skeleton is the structure

Most organization charts, I have seen from KAMs, essentially describe hierarchical relationships between people. Yet, at the origin, organization charts describe hierarchical relations between job roles (and not people). As people tend to change roles faster than the structural organization of job roles changes, if you have not made a distinction between the person and the job role, obviously updating your organizational chart is going to take a bit of effort.

Furthermore the hierarchical organization chart is just one element which helps you to understand how your customer’s organization works. It is comparable with a human skeleton giving the body a structure. But a skeleton doesn’t usually move on its own (except in horror movies).

The muscles are the power

In real life, the body needs muscles to move.

The analogue in an organization is the power the person has in a certain role. We all know that this power is not necessarily dependant on the hierarchical position of the role. To understand how an organization works, you somehow have to add the power component to your chart describing your relations in your customer organization.  In a more sophisticated scenario, you would also find information about the motivations and the source of the power of the person filling a certain role.

The nervous system carries information

Muscles and skeleton are both necessary but not sufficient for a body to move. Muscles need to be triggered by nerves.

In organizations, the analogue to nerves is conduits of information. In theory, this information flow should follow the hierarchical connections. In reality, information flow is actually governed by informal connections between the people working together. However, knowing that a certain relationship exists is not enough. For effective influence management, the quality of this relation must be known. Firstly, it is important to determine if it is an amicable or adversarial relationship.  Secondly, you need to determine the degree of strength of the feelings.

The senses show you the outside world

As a KAM, you want to influence the customer organization to eventually select your offering for solving a particular problem. To use again the analogy of the human body, you need to stimulate the senses so the nerves in turn direct the muscles which then move the body into a certain direction.  Your ability to stimulate the senses of an organization depends on four things:

–      The quality of the relation you have with influential people in the customer organization

–      The attitude these influential people have towards your solution

–      Knowing how to deliver a message so it is heard

–      The roles people have in a buying center (additional to their hierarchical position)

With exception of the last element, these distinctions are often omitted and can lead to serious misinterpretations of a situation and thus derail a deal.

Conclusion

Effective systems for capturing relationship intelligence should thus distinguish as a minimum the following data elements:

–      Hierarchical relations between roles

–      People filling these roles

–      Informal power of the people in their roles

–      Informal connections between people (strength and quality)

–      Quality of your connection to influential people

–      Formal roles in a buying center differentiated by opportunity 

–      Attitude of the influential people towards your solution per opportunity

The ease with which you can present these elements in an up to date form obviously also depends on the choice of graphical representation.

For complex organizations, there is also a need for a tool that allows for easy updating and automatic drawing of the graphic representation.

But these are topics meriting future own blog posts. For now you have already a check list which will help you to understand whether you track the right data for your relationship intelligence to be useful for defining influence management strategies.

Christian Maurer

Don’t shoot the messenger! Or how to become a trusted advisor

The message and the messenger

People make decisions all the time: purchasing choices, reorganization decisions, recruitment, etc.  A large part of the choice is based on information received and / or understood.  And although relationships play a key role in influencing the decision makers, facts, figures, and statistics (lies, damned lies and statistics to quote probably Disraeli) are also crucial.  What is the connection between the information carried and the messenger?

Informed decisions

Obviously information is shared and discussed during a complex decision making process.  Sales teams prepare sales messages, kits, demonstrations, etc.  The potential client holds internal meetings, they look at the literature and compare solutions, they meet the sales force.  There may be a pilot study, the results of which are shared and analyzed.  There are probably some more internal meetings, during which the outcome of the pilot study is discussed: ROI, adoption rate, customer satisfaction, etc.

And yet, sometimes someone out of the blue stops the whole process and the whole thing is dropped.  This someone may or may not have had access to the information during the evaluation period.

Money makes the world go round

Holding the purse strings gives you the power to act, decide, veto, choose, etc.  You can step in at the last minute and decide to call the whole thing off.  But why would you call something off?  Your team has been shifting through and sorting information, facts, statistics, and comparisons. 

But oftentimes, decisions are cancelled or ignored not because of the quality of the information itself, but because there is a lack of faith in either the information or in the decision makers themselves.

Information and person: the powerful combination

Undeniable facts and trustworthy people are a powerful combination.  Putting the two together creates a very strong source of influence, one that will be very difficult to ignore.

The trustworthy people in my network are those that I have trusted in the past and who have come up with the goods.  I may not notice all the people who work well and achieve good results, but I will notice the unexpected.  For example

·         I am impressed and I remember when good results come from someone I hadn’t trusted.

·         I suddenly take note of a person who has been in my entourage and consistent for a long time.

I also remember the unexpectedly disappointing.

·         I notice if I trust someone who then goes on to fail to deliver or to make good on promises.

Trusting relationships, business, professional and personal alike, are built up over the years and stand the test of time.  We have built up a working history together.  A crucial factor for a trusting relationship is the belief in the absence of vested interests.

An envelope is as important as a letter

The information at the centre of the decision making process will be brought to me by people with whom I have varying levels of trust.  In addition, the way the arguments and logic are framed will make a difference.  I am more likely to understand (and as a result trust) a person who matches my way of thinking and uses the same level of technical language or jargon as me.

The road to becoming a trusted advisor

You may not hold the pen that signs all the forms, but there are ways you can build up your reputation as a trusted advisor in order to gain influence.

1.       Match your communication style to your listener and his / her level of knowledge

2.       Do what you say you’ll do.  Demonstrate again and again that you can be trusted.

3.       Be open about your relationships with others and any conflicts of interest.  Knowing in advance is far better than finding out by accident later.

4.       Communicate about the reliability of your information.  Tell people if you think this is a trusted document or if you think that the information is biased.  Be prepared to say why.  You’ll gain the reputation of being able to analyze information before you present it.

Cate Farrall

Can LinkedIn be Your Principal Networking Tool?

The short answer is no, but it’s a start

Limitations

Firstly, LinkedIn contains only information that a person is willing to reveal about her/himself. Secondly, there is no indication of the quality of the relationship between two people.

But what about the degree of separation that is shown on LinkedIn?

This actually only indicates the number of intermediates between you and your target. If you are linked to someone on second degree, all this means is that there is an intermediary person between you and your target. To reach someone on third degree you need to go through 2 intermediaries.

For people you are linked at second degree LinkedIn shows you the names of all intermediaries that have a direct connection to your target. For people on third degree the people listed have a direct connection to someone who in turn has a direct connection to your target. However, the identity of this second intermediary is not revealed.

So, if you want to use the introduction functionality of LinkedIn, you are faced with the question which intermediary you are going to ask to give you an introduction to your target. Will you choose:

–          An intermediary who owes you a favor?

–          The intermediary you know best?

Already from these two questions you can see that you need extra information to take a decision which is not stored in LinkedIn: the quality of your links. Very often though people have not documented this information in whatever tool they use to keep track of their network, let alone on LinkedIn. Knowing the quality of the link between you and your intermediary and ideally also having an indication of the quality of the link between the intermediary and your target is crucial though in order to judge the probability of success of your introduction request.

Alternative Functionality in LinkedIn

Alternatively you can choose the direct approach by asking for a connection. Depending on how your target has set up the LinkedIn account you need to know the targets exact e-mail address to do so. In this case, you might ask yourself what the use of LinkedIn is. Would it not be easier to write the e-mail directly? Using LinkedIn only makes sense if you hope to get access to the network of your target.

Other people have set up their account to accept connection requests based on commonalities such as:

·         You are former colleagues having worked in the same organization

·         You were class mates

·         You have done business together

·         You both belong to at least one LinkedIn Group.

There are some further criteria for which though you once again need to know the exact e-mail address of the target.

Using the direct approach, you eliminate the uncertainty about the quality of the relationships between you, your intermediaries and your target. However, good networkers know that the indirect access is more powerful than the direct access. I personally have experienced this phenomenon even on LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Good networkers know that they need an electronic tool to track their network. Although I know of only one off-the-shelf system that allows you to track the quality of links.  The next best choice is to use a tool that allows you to add custom fields to track relationship quality. In any case, though, you will have to proactively assess and document the quality of these links.

Although LinkedIn cannot therefore be your choice for a primary tool to track your network, it can be very useful to support your networking activities.

·         You can be reminded of people who fell off the radar

·         You can find potential routes to a target.

It will be much more effective if you use the telephone or other offline methods to identify which of your potential intermediaries has the best quality relation to your target. By doing so, you can also test the value message that you want to transmit to your target, the second fundamental element for success to expand your network. You then can also use the telephone to establish the contact to your target.

If you do not like the phone, you can use the same process with e-mails. Yet remember, a network between people goes beyond having a list of names in the form of e-mail addresses or aliases in a social network. It consists of relations which are usually based on many differing and repeated interactions, using all kinds of communication media to convey messages. Communication media based on the written word use only 7% of the bandwidth available to humans communicating. Communication media that allow the transmission of tone (e.g. telephone or skype), add another 34% of bandwidth for your message to pass. The remaining communication bandwidth between humans and, incidently, by far the fastest channel is the exchange of non verbal signals (e.g. body language). This level can only be fully reached through face to face contacts.

LinkedIn can help you identify some possible routes to people, but without an indication of the strength of links between its members.  To maximize the power of your network you will need, at some point, to fill in and find a way of remember the gaps in the relationship information.

Christian Maurer

Building Bridges: when less is more

Mark Granovetter is famous for his ideas on weak ties within social networks (Granovetter, 1973, American Journal of Sociology).  Although his most famous work is now nearly 40 years old, it’s still relevant and a fresh read.  I’ll start with an outline of his main ideas and if you want more detail here is a link to his original article (http://bit.ly/cj4fhO).

Granovetter starts with the premise that within social networks there are different degrees of relationships.  He suggests that intuitively we recognize our relationships as strong, weak or absent.  Two people who share a strong tie are likely to spend time together and are also similar in various ways.  They are also likely to share friends and relationships.  This leads to the development of close networks of people.

Enter the weak ties

Weak ties link people who know each other less well, perhaps only in passing or as an acquaintance.  These ties, according to Granovetter, can act as bridges from one close network to another.  A bridge is a point in a network that provides the only path from one person to another.  For more on this, have a look at the Social Capital Blob (http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/).  The basic idea from Granovetter is that “no strong tie is a bridge”.  On the other hand, certain weak ties are bridges to other networks, other sources of information and other influencers.

The strength in the weak links

Closed networks have, according to Granovetter, only strong links and few or no links to other people in other networks.  These networks run the risk of suffocating and, under the right circumstances can die out (see Granovetter’s article for more details: http://bit.ly/cj4fhO).

Networks need weak links or bridges to expand and to grow.  New blood, new contacts, new information, new insights, new sources of help are needed.  This will help to spread ideas and messages more efficiently.  Get out of your comfort zone and make the most of any weak links you have.  Or, even more uncomfortable but more interesting, start building links with people you don’t know yet.

Bridges and Sales

So, how does this help those of us who work in sales?

·         No strong relationship is a bridge, so those happy people you’ve known for years might not be able to help you expand your network and make new contacts.

·         You cannot only rely on your strong links, if you want to extend the reach of your messages and ideas.  Get out of comfort zone and meet new people.

·         Some weak relationships will act as bridges, so new professional contacts are potential gateways.  Use your existing weak links to expand and reach new people.  Always ask if they know other people who might be interested in what you do.  If you have made a good impression, they will be happy to recommend you to their professional or personal contacts.

·         Some weak relationships will act as bridges, but how do I know which ones?  For the moment, let’s keep it simple.  Pretend you don’t know and you never will, but ask for recommendations all the same.

Cate Farrall