Relationship Economics, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 4Strategic Relationship Planning in Your Organization

In the previous chapter, I focused on your relationship-development efforts to become more intentional, strategic, and quantifiable. The Six Phases give you an overarching road map of what needs to happen for you to identify, build, nurture, sustain and ultimately capitalize on your portfolio of relationships. In this chapter, I want to focus on the how. This chapter should help you better understand, beyond your efforts, how a team or organization can leverage its broad base of business relationships to move key strategic priorities forward.

Most professionals agree that relationships are essential; few bother to measure or leverage them to their full potential. Even though every organization creates an annual sales plan—in which it crafts a go-to-market strategy, I've yet to find one that says, “For us to reach our key goals and objectives, we need to focus on an authentic and mutually valuable relationship with these specific individuals, and here is our game plan over the next four quarters to get there.”

Even with marquee clients, I consistently see individuals and teams confuse their strategy and planning. Specifically, they prioritize relationships for an upcoming deal when focused on revenue growth within their named accounts, geographic territories, or global account management efforts. Similarly, competent project teams focus on “what we should do and how we should do it” and seldom on “what relationships ...