Your firm’s relationship potential

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the “Excellence in Account Management” seminar at the Institute for Marketing of the University of St. Gallen.

The topic was the “relationship potential of your firm”. The participants gave us some good feedback and we had a short discussion revolving around the topic.

What is the relationship potential of your firm ?

Very simply put, this is the sum of the relationships of your employees. An organization is a rather abstract entity, but its employees are not abstract at all. So to understand what the network between Nestlé and Coca-Cola is, we simply look at the employees at both companies which know someone at the other company. Adding up all those individual relationships give you the relationship potential between those firms.

Where does this create value ?

A few Use Cases come to mind, but Sales & Account Management is the biggest one by far. In Enterprise Sales (investment goods, large deals) relationships are key in building trust and confidence between organizations. These relationships are a key factor in getting a large deal through. So why not use existing relationships to your company’s advantage ?

Making relationships tangible

The key thing above all is to make these relationships known and accessible to everyone in the company. Traditionally this is done by asking around and asking for people to submit their contacts. While this works great at a small company it simply doesn’t scale for enterprises with more than 150 employees. But with technology you now have the ability to do so, by automatically evaluating communication metadata of your firm at scale.

Why would you want to do this?

Today you hire employees for more than just their skills. In an increasing decentralised, project-oriented and collaborative world your employee’s (permanent or temporary) relationships & networks are of just as much value. Getting things done nowadays is more than working through a list of todos, it’s about reaching out, building trust and developing relationships.

There are a number of applications which I’ll explore over the next few posts on how you can make your company’s relationships tangible to your firm.