Keeping In Touch - Tricks from CRM

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar.

- Robert Brault

You will hear busy executives say how much they’d like to spend more time meeting clients or suppliers. This even extends to catching up with old colleagues or school friends. Their calendar is full this week and when they try to book it for the following week the other person can’t make it. This back and forth usually results in the opportunity to connect being lost.

As a Relationship Manager with potentially 20-30 appointments a month not to mention catching up with friends, let me offer a few suggestions to improve your chances to connect

Have a Account Plan

Decide for the year the frequency you wish to contact clients and set a goal to achieve each quarter, month and week. This will be come the framework you will build on over time. An extension of this plan will be your contacts database. For another post by me on this go here.

Here and now

At the end of each meeting schedule your next. You both can check your calendars on the spot and agree a date. A commitment made in person is rarely changed. This time can also be a chance to find out a little more about them or for you to share information with them

Well Ahead of Time

If you don’t meet them frequently set a date 1, 2 or even 3 months into the future. It ensures you get a clear schedule and is rarely refused as people easily commit to something that is far away. This is even more affective if you do a bulk reminder at the start of every month to ensure you are back on their radar.

In One

Always try to complete a booking in one take. Offer a range of dates to pick from (saves the email tennis) and if you’re flexible about location, before/after work, by phone, etc, say so.

Contingency

Have some flexibility in your calendar but the trick, let them know about it! I rarely do an off site meeting on a Monday but I make no secret of it. Clients know that it’s there if they really need to move the schedule but they also know I won’t offer it up unless it’s urgent.

Go with the flow

Learn your clients work patterns and set your requests accordingly. I conference call one client at 5.30pm because he’s in his car on the way home, I get 30 minutes of his undivided attention . The flexibility might mean meeting them early, at their office or lunch. I knew one manager who use to change his flight at the last minute just to get quality time with a client on the flight home

A Challenge!

Take a look at your calendar for the next 3 months and ask yourself is there’s any client, colleague, business partner or supplier you’d like to spend time with? Make the appointment now, you won’t regret it.

Network Weaving

Improved connectivity is created through an iterative process of knowing the network and knitting the network

- Valdis Krebs and June Holly



We are all connected. These connections form networks. Some of them personal, some social others business others we may not even be aware of. So how do we take advantage of these networks in business?

Kerbs and Holly in their paper Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving
put forward the idea that it's all about knowing and then knitting your network. The more collaborations among the members of the network the more vibrant and more valuable it becomes.

In getting to know your network there are a number of general patterns that can be observed. The obvious ones being:

• Birds of a feather flock together
• The close by, form a tie

But there are other just as important patterns that strong, effective networks display. For example:

• Diversity maximises innovation (different ideas)
  
• Robustness (more people more connections)
  
• Prominent nodes or hubs (there are always brokers or well connected people)
  
• Many indirect links (don't rely on just one relationship)
  

By actively managing your relationships you can give it direction. Introducing people to each other that would not have normally met creates, knits, even stronger ties.

The paper is a great insight into how you can take an objective view of your own network and then identify areas that need improving.

I recommend you read the paper (it's a short one) and check out the web site www.networkweaving.com for case studies and the blog.

When you know where you are starting from it makes it a lot easier to get to where you want to be.

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