How to Spot 3 Key Watch-outs of Transactional Drag
Transactional Drag is a term we’ve coined at Verity Relationship Intelligence; it means a narrowing of vision and diversion of attention away from relationships that reduces the partnership with your customer or client to little more than a transaction.
But how do you spot the warning signs?
Essentially, Transactional Drag means a deeper focus and energy on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’. Or the work over and above the relationship. You can read more about it here
Spotting it is crucial because it can be a major inhibitor of your business growth, so you need to know what you’re looking for. We’ve defined three of the key watch-outs that can help you identify if Transactional Drag is impacting you.
Watch-out 1: What’s your client narrative like?
Think about what your clients say about you, and how they might spontaneously describe you as a company.
Is the first thing they mention likely to be the ‘what’ of the work, like the deliverables, timelines, projects or ways of working? Or are they equally likely to focus on the ‘how’ – how it feels to work with you; your alignment to their goals; the passion and commitment of your people and teams; and how invested you are in achieving success with them?
If it’s likely to be biased towards the former, then reflect on the key barriers to developing a closer bond with your client and try to course correct here.
Carrying out regular temperature checks is an important part of the service we provide at Verity, and helps track the extent that the client narrative is transactionally based and if it’s changing, even subtly.
These insights can be enlightening and help you construct strategic relationship plans that support both the transactional and relational steps required to achieve your growth plans.
Watch-out 2: How does your client behave around you?
Client behaviour provides a hugely important window into your relationship. And nothing is more insightful than the kind of information they’re prepared to share with you as their partner.
How and when do your clients ask for your perspective? Are you frustrated, as a business, by your client’s lack of openness or transparency when it comes to information you would find useful about them? Are members of your client’s teams emotionally open, inviting you into their inner circle on critical matters, or are they purely transactionally driven?
If your clients rarely, if ever, give you a business context to the projects and services they procure from you, or they’re focused specifically on what you can deliver for them and when, then it’s likely you may be drifting into Transactional Drag territory.
Watch-out 3: What is your own team’s mindset?
As well as looking directly at the relationship, and how your client acts, you need to interrogate your own in-house attitudes and behaviours too.
Does your team suggest that it’s purely the work that defines success? That as long as the work is good, the relationship will be too? We’ve observed that while the work may win the contract, it’s often the relationship that loses the business
Look over your team’s action plans. Are they full of tactical work fixes around what you deliver, such as short-term solutions to operations and ways of working? Or are there also actions which specifically aim to build the relationship, to foster a feeling, spirit or experience you know to be important to the client’s business and your desired outcomes? For example, this could be leveraging empathy at an uncertain time of client reorganisation.
Lastly, do your teams acknowledge that operational issues have a relational impact, and one that needs managing? Do they instinctively consider the unintended emotional response to a functional fail? For example, the question of ‘how much do they care?’ after periods of sloppy mistakes or ‘how committed are they?’ after high levels of people turnover?
All these factors can be indicators of how embedded the Transactional Drag risk is for you.
What can you do to course correct?
If reading the above raises one or two red flags for you, the first thing you should do is get a handle on how big a problem Transactional Drag is within your organisation.
At Verity, we have various tools available that can help you with this and there are plenty of steps – ranging from short- and medium-term fixes to long-term solutions – that can help you begin to mitigate any issues you’re having.
