5 Key Strategies to Overcome Transactional Drag
At Verity Relationship Intelligence our relationship experts have developed a number of solutions to the problem of Transactional Drag, shaped by their many years of experience.
They can give you all the support you need to get your organisation in a better place.
Below, we share how to get started along the path to improvement and better, more sustainable business growth.
Once you’ve identified it, there are a few simple things you can start thinking about – and acting upon – to mitigate the negative impacts that Transactional Drag can have.
Fix 1: Diagnose the root cause
Take a minute, stand back and review the relationship with your client. Is the client’s organisational culture the cause of the Transactional Drag you’re experiencing? Is the treatment of your business the same as their approach to others – that you’re a supplier and nothing more? And, if this is your role, does it have to remain that way? What can be done to foster more of a partnership?
Ask yourself some honest questions, too. How might the actions of your team and your organisation be unintentionally contributing to these issues?
By delving into the problems and meeting them head on, you’ll get a clearer picture of some changes you can effect immediately that may help.
Fix 2: Invest in "non-task" time
It’s certainly true that the growth of remote working has improved the working lives of many people for the extra flexibility it’s created.
However, it has also fundamentally changed how businesses maintain relationships with each other because it’s naturally pushed many to be more transactional. For example, how many of your client meetings or interactions are status, agenda or work-driven as opposed to purely in service of the partnership?
One simple way to rebalance this is by considering other ways you can reasonably move your client interactions away from on-screen to in-person or “non-task” driven. As well as building a personal connection, you’ll also begin to understand your clients at a deeper level and engage with them in a more empathetic and efficient way.
Some clients may be naturally resistant to this but you can find ways to motivate them too – in-person meetings aren’t an indulgence, they’re an investment in efficiency and effectiveness.
Fix 3: Leverage empathy
At Verity, we find empathy maps can be a really powerful tool. They help you better understand your clients, what it is they need and what they want from their business relationship with you.
An empathy map is a detailed one-pager filled with everything you know that contributes to your client relationship – their goals and motivations, the things they say and do, and what they hear from you. This lays out everything clearly, simply and directly and helps build your understanding of your client, focusing your collective organisational mind on them.
Once your whole team is clear on the bigger picture, you can use insights from the empathy maps you’ve drawn up to inform how you do business with them. Maybe you need to be more sympathetic towards a particular issue they’re having around productivity? Or perhaps they feel greater pressure than most from the people they report into?
Use all the information at your disposal to create a great experience and become a more efficient, effective and empathetic business towards them.
Fix 4: Write a relationship to-do list
We’re all familiar with to-do lists but, by their very nature, they also tend to be transactional and task-based.
However, relationship to-do lists are grounded in how you want your client to feel about working with you and set out different things you can do, or do more of, to improve your relationship.
Relationship to-do lists are especially important when a client is experiencing a situation of high stress, and your list can help you to focus on exactly what you need to do to help them, rather than just simply delivering projects.
For example, perhaps one of your clients is going through a restructure and you know they need to feel understood and supported so they can better cope with the uncertainty and state of flux they’re experiencing? Or maybe your client’s business is not evolving in the way they would like. They need you to be a force for change and push the agenda they want, because they feel powerless to act themselves.
These actions, and responses to your client’s issues, can be laid out in a clear and ordered relationship to-do list to help you help them.
Transactional Drag can be identified – and fixed
At Verity a vast number of the businesses we’ve helped have successfully moved from a transactional relationship to a partnership with their clients – and have gone on to reap the benefits of this.
Transactional Drag is a common problem but one that often goes unnoticed or undiagnosed, because while you’re busy focusing on delivering you may be unintentionally under-leveraging one of the most powerful commercial levers of all, the relationship itself.
