Give your Relationships a Health Check

How good do you think your business relationships are? Give it a health check before it's too late


I was recently catching up on some of my favourite podcasts on Manager Tools. The topics vary but all have a theme of how to be a better manager. One of the topics touched on the question of how good are your relationships with clients, friends, co-workers and class mates.

We can very easily fool ourselves into thinking that we have a great relationship with a client or company but how do we really know? We can take this delusion even further and think just because we have 100's of links on LinkedIn or the email address of everyone you ever met in a PDA we have an amazing business network also.

Although the guys at Manager Tools had a test of their own I have my own suggested health check to give your business network and client list.

Overall Health

• How many business contacts do you have?
• What percentage have you their full name, address, phone numbers and email address?
• How many have you made contact with in the last year?

Detailed Check

• How many have you met in the last 6-12 months?
• How many do you know the private mobile number and private email address for?
• How many do you know the spouses name and kids name?

The key to a relationship health check is quality and quantity of relationships. Once you know how healthy your relationships are you can work on improving them.

Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to check the health of your business (or other) relationships.

Linking your calendar to your goals

Lessons from GE's Approach to Personal Productivity.




While reading the HBR Editors Blog last month I came across an interesting post called Lessons from GE's Approach to Personal Productivity. The pearl of wisdom I picked up from this article was this:

"Compare your calendar with the priorities. Label the purpose of every regular or recurring activity on your quarterly calendar and highlight those activities that are connected with your top five priorities. This simple exercise will reveal where you’re squandering your time."

Although this point is valuable for any busy manager I believe it is even more relevant to anyone who brings value to their organisation through contact with customers, suppliers or prospects on a regular basis. Your calendar will be a reflection of the relationships you are forming, building or neglecting and in addition to telling you where time is being spent (or squandered) you have a metric on which to measure your performance.

If you are in sales, how many 1st and 2nd meetings have you this week. Managers in support or services could look at how many existing clients they have "stayed in front" of through calls, meetings or mail. In partner management or procurement how many planning meetings or reviews have been done.

Take a look at each of your goals for this quarter and try to convert the "measurable" element to something you could see in your calendar, now look for the evidence. You will gain a great insight into your performance and you will also have a weekly/monthly measure of performance.

Difference between New Account and New relationship

"If you're looking to build a successful business, it doesn't start with sales and evolve to "satisfied" customers (unless you're still selling in 1985). It starts with relationships and builds to loyalty.." quote Jeffrey Gitomer.

I receive a weekly eZine from one of the many sales guru's Jeffrey Gitomer. I highly recommend his eZine, Sales Caffeine, as it's very well produced and strikes the right balance between being informative while still marketing. This weeks article struck a cord with me "The difference between new account and new relationship". He was making the point that when we make a sale that's great but the real sale is that you have forged a new relationship. He expands on this, especially with his relationship check list. Summing up with how important it is to truly relate to your customer.

The article struck a cord because it emphasised the point that we are custodians of an extremely valuable asset in a customers relationship. That relationship represents trust, referrals, testimonials, your next sale and recurring revenue. It begins with the sale but is strengthen with every conversation, meeting, promise kept, problem pre-empted and instance of excellent service. The truly great organisation have this engraved at every level from service desk agent to the CEO, not just one or two sales or relationship managers out in the field.

Great Expectation

How setting expectations makes life easier for all concerned

One the the roles of a Relationship Manager (be it CRM, Account or Project Director) is to balance the requirements, sometimes demands, of your clients with the constraints of resources, budgets, time or quality.

One of the most affective ways to handle this is managing expectations. Sometime it's OK to say "not right now" or "can this wait" or even "I can do this but we need to agree a scope change". It sounds so simple, so why do we find it so difficult to manage expectations?

Too often in business we forget that clients are people too. For the most part they are reasonable and will work with you to achieve your mutual success but you must communicate with them. The only ever appear unreasonable because we don't understand their view point.

I have been exploring this topic as part of improving service levels with clients and a very interesting fact came out. Upon review of 2nd and 3rd line calls the client was willing, in almost every case, to move the resolution date, upon request. What was even more interesting was at service reviews satisfaction levels went up! They felt more informed and in greater control of the situation.

Even more interesting,the support teams satisfaction levels went up because they felt more in control and under less pressure.


There are some great articles out there on this topic, one of my favourites is by Naomi Karten.

How do you eat an elephant - Managing a large number of clients relationships?

I was chatting with the division head of large bank recently and the topic of how they managed customer relationships when there are a significant number of customers, over 2000, over a number of countries.

An interesting challenge but not that uncommon. Although the implementation will vary from organisation to organisation (and individual to individual) it will boil down to a Client Relationship (Accounts) Plan.

We are not talking about a plan to reactively respond to queries or even regular reports, though these might make up some element of it. We are talking about proactively managing and building the relationships in a define, measured and repeatable way.
It will be a project, starting with Requirements (what do the business want from better relationships, what does success look like, etc), then a Proposal (here's how we think we can achieve it) and then the Plan (including costs, tasks, deliverables, schedule and quality measures).

So how does this relate to African riddle of eating an elephant? Just like the elephant, you must break the project into bit size pieces and give yourself enough time to do (eat!) them all. The typical time frame is going to be one year (contract renewal cycle) so your plan should address what you will be doing each month, week and day to "eat that elephant".

With the requirements of the business established how do we prioritise which clients need what level of attention? With your Client Relationship Plan you now have a communication document to share with the sales team, account managers, marketing, HR, Service Desk and the clients themselves. With this invaluable feed back you can agree a sensible and achievable strategy with the business.

As for that division head with the 2000 clients, he has adopted a multi-channel approach the centre piece of which is a Centre of Excellence (The Lab). This honey pot technique can be very affective but we'll have to wait and see how well it works