The Value of Helping Our Clients Succeed

Lou Gerstner, former Chairman and Chief Executive of IBM once said "In the end, an organisation is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value".

Jack Welch, former Chief Executive of General Electric once said "I find that the more we focus on our customer's success, the more successful we become".

These observations lay at the heart of a work session we facilitated recently for the Sales Strategy team of a large professional services provider, and taken together they allowed us to come to the conclusion that if we help our clients succeed we will also succeed in the obligation to create value for our own organisation.

Our conversation then extended to consider what value this organisation could create by becoming more focused on solving client issues rather than selling predeveloped product and service offerings and the calculations (which were their calculations) was this figure could reach into the £100s of millions over a 2 to 3 year period.

If this 'new and different result' (in terms of the value they would create for both the client and themslves) was clear and compelling, the key issue became what are the new ways of thinking and the new ways of working they would have to enable in their client facing teams (at all levels) to achieve it.

FranklinCovey's experience of this (and the one we shared with this group) is that true value is created (for both Client and the Partner organisations) when 3 elements are present in the interactions between the two

1. IQ - the ability to mutually explore the issues to be addressed and the results to be achieved and the impact attributable to both (and the skill to do so when these may not be immediately apparent)
2. EQ - the ability to explore these issues in a conversational structure, as part of which challenging elements can be raised and dealt with in a way that both parties can engage in
3. XQ - the ability to craft these IQ & EQ elements into an accessable and repeatable approach that is used by every memeber of the Client and Partner teams every day as part of every interaction.

and while the scale of most organisations may not allow them to realise £100s of millions of value for their clients or themselves by adopting this approach, the principles remain true and offer the prospect of achieving a step change in results for most (if not all) client relationships.