When you ask Key Account Managers (KAMs) to show you the relationships they have established in their account, they will most likely will show you some form of organization chart. Sophisticated KAMs have annotated those graphs with additional information about the people involved. Usually, showing this information is accompanied with the remark: “It is a bit out of date, but I just did not have the time to update it yet. Things are changing so fast in this organization”. A sustainable up-to-date view of your relations in a complex account starts with having a more granular view of the data elements you need to describe your relations allowing for more flexible faster updates.
The skeleton is the structure
Most organization charts, I have seen from KAMs, essentially describe hierarchical relationships between people. Yet, at the origin, organization charts describe hierarchical relations between job roles (and not people). As people tend to change roles faster than the structural organization of job roles change itselfs, if you have not made a distinction between the person and the job role, obviously updating your organizational chart is going to take a bit of effort and be a complicated process.
Furthermore, the hierarchical organization chart is just one element which helps you to understand how your customer’s organization works. Organization works are comparable to a human skeleton: it has a recognizable outline and form, but cannot support itself or move on its own (except maybe in horror movies).
The muscles are the power
In real life, the body needs muscles to move.
The analogue in an organization is the power the person has in a certain role. We all know that this power is not necessarily dependent on the hierarchical position of the role. To understand how an organization works, you somehow have to add the power component to your chart, describing your relations’ power position in your customer organization. In a more sophisticated scenario, you would also find information about the motivations and the source of the power of the person filling a certain role.
The nervous system carries information
Muscles and skeleton are both necessary but not sufficient for a body to move. Muscles need to be triggered by nerves.
In organizations, the conduct of information represents the nerves. In theory, this information flow should follow the hierarchical connections. In reality, information flow is actually governed by informal connections between the people working together. However, knowing that a certain relationship exists is not enough. For effective influence management, the quality of this relation must be known and assessed. Firstly, it is important to determine if it is an amicable or adversarial relationship. Secondly, you need to determine the degree of strength of the feelings.
The senses show you the outside world
As a KAM, you want to influence the customer organization in order to to eventually select the right your offering to for solveving a particular problem. Using the analogy of the human body once more, you need to stimulate the senses so the nerves in turn direct the muscles which then move the body into a certain direction. Your ability to stimulate the senses of an organization depends on four things:
The quality of the relation you have with influential people in the customer organization
The attitude these influential people have towards your solution
Knowing how to deliver a message so it is heard
The roles people have in a buying process center (additional to their hierarchical position)
With exception of the last element, these distinctions are often omitted and can lead to serious misinterpretations of a situation and thus derail a deal.
Conclusion
Effective systems for capturing relationship intelligence should thus distinguish as a minimum the following data elements:
Hierarchical relations between roles
People filling these roles
Informal power of the people in their roles
Informal connections between people (strength and quality)
Quality of your connection to influential people
Formal roles in a buying center differentiated by opportunity
Attitude of the influential people towards your solution per opportunity
The ease with which you can present these elements in an up-to-date form obviously also depends on the choice of graphical representation.
For complex organizations, there is also a need for a tool that allows for easy updating and automatic drawing of the graphic representation.
But these are topics requiring their own future. For now, you have have already a check list which will help you to understand whether you track the right data for your relationship intelligence to be useful, and for defining influence management strategies.