“She’s leaving me because she really wants to,
And she’ll be happy when she’s gone.
She’ll be happy, she’ll be so very happy
She’ll dance and sing or even learn to fly
And spend her time with anyone but me.”
– Lyric from “She’s Leaving Me Because She Really Wants To,” by Lyle Lovett
Sometimes, when people lose a piece of business, they say, “Well, XYZ Corp bought the business. Our old customer will be miserable with XYZ Corp, let me tell you, and then, they’ll come running back to us…” When they say that, they’re masking the fact that they didn’t have a relationship strategy that held things together. If two parties agree on a relationship strategy, that relationship is virtually impossible to tear apart.
In this song, friends suggest to Lyle Lovett that his lost lover will be miserable without him. He replies, practically and confidently, that “no, she’s leaving me because she really wants to. And she’ll be happy when she’s gone.”
These are the stakes when it comes to relationship strategies.
Relationship strategies are the glue in business, and they have to be rooted in what the client wants to accomplish. That means that we a) have to know, and b) have to be able (and willing) to help them git’r done.
It doesn’t mean that we have to control all the assets, or have access to every single lever they need to pull to git’r done, it means we have to be trustworthy — someone they can turn to for answers – and when they don’t know what questions to ask, we have to be providing them with the right questions. In either case, the answers don’t have to reside within our walls, or be created between our ears. It’s about pulling one another in a common direction, and relying on one another to carry the part of the load that they’re uniquely suited to carry.
It also doesn’t mean that we have to agree from the first step that what the client wants is always the right thing. In healthy relationships constructive conflict is good, because it infuses frequent validation of the path and incents shared accountability throughout the journey.
Are we talking to the right people? About the right things? At the right time? With the right frequency? Are we bringing ideas and helping them build a network that is centered on us as a broad provider of value, even when not directly tied to a service or product we deliver?
When we have client strategies that both we and the client are emotionally invested in and operationally committed to, then we won’t leave each other. And, even on a bad day, when one of us might want to separate, we can’t, because we’re reliant upon one another with the greater good hanging in the balance.
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