Wit and Wisdom of an Engineer: Not All Client Relationships are Created and Managed Equally

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Not All Client Relationships are Created and Managed Equally

Engineering consulting firms historically have low relational intelligence (RI). They don't understand the many different and complex ways you can relate to your clients. Everyone needs to travel down the path of reorganizing marketing around client relationships. Organizations are focused on moving to the "Trusted Adviser" relationship connection/model, but few are actively engaged in shifting clients toward these more profitable relationships. Engineers are not the best at understanding how relationships work (note - I think female engineers and managers get relationship management much better than their male counterparts - - and I think organization are beginning to understand this). The focus on project delivery and execution sometimes over shadows what really is at stake - - the delivery of a successful relationship. They don't understand how many different kinds of relationships your clients have with your organization and its brand. They don't understand that "marriage partners" and "best friends" are resource intensive - building them and maintaining them requires significant investments. Try changing the terms or increasing your fees in a marriage relationship -- marriages don't like betrayal. If you are a niche or specialty firm, most of your relationships might fall into the "One-Night Stand" category. A key goal for strategic marketing should be thinking about how to reinforce profitable relationships and change unproductive ones.

Jill Avery, Susan Fournier, and John Wittenbraker cover this topic in the current issue of Harvard Business Review - Unlock the Mysteries of Your Customer Relationships. They plot a list of relationship types in a graph with Price Premium on the Y-axis and Market Share on the X-axis. Read the list of relationships - it is obvious which are in the high Price Premium - High Market Share quadrant. Think about your existing relationships and how you might label them -- then think about how to change "Buddies" to "Star-Groupie" and a new approach to relating.