Why measure relationsips?

If we could measure the succes of relationships, we could compare those results with revenue to gain a different perspective about our business.  

Revenue is one outcome of a relationship. 

What are other outcomes you could measure?

• Accountability: determine if your customers and prospects agree that you meet or exceed the expectations you define
• Engagement: understand how your customers and prospects interact with your company 
• Loyalty: discover if your customers are invested in your company's success and how they work with you to achieve it
• Brand Equity and Value: learn how your brand help your company build relationships
• Diversity: understand how diversity impacts employee teams, innovation, and productivity
• Partnerships: discover the types of value your partners contribute beyond the bottom line
• Change: learn how change is helping your organization beyond revenue
• Innovation: go beyond productivity to discover all ways that product and process innovations impact your your bottom line 

How can this impact your organization?

Factors like these have curious correlations with revenue that can change your perspective of your business. Some to consider:

• Why it's important for your company to be on-brand. Are your company’s outbound-facing content and experiences aligned with the brand values? Are call centers using consistent approaches? How about sales? If your company is not on-brand, your prospects and customers may get confused when they interact with your company and drop out of the purchase process or decide not to work with you anymore. Or they may find your company not as cohesive as you present. No one wants to do business with a fractured company. Such confusion and incohesiveness may cause you to lose revenue.
• Why you should deliver what you promise. This is a metric that could be tracked today. Understand how many people confirm through independent reviews that you deliver on your marketing and sales promises. Or map a metric to measure the impact of awards and third-party reviews. Let's face it, when you don't deliver what is promised, you are at risk not to make a sale. People don't trust what you say as true. And who wants to be swindled. If your accountability is low, but your revenue is high, consider what would happen if you were a more accountable company.  
• How loyal are your customers? Understand how many referrals you get and the motivation for repeat purchases. (Note: Repeat purchases may be a result of a brand commitment made, not based on a relationship.) There may need to be a survey component to this research to fully understand the depth of loyalty and what’s motivating it. Loyal customers will tell their friends about your company. 
• High engagement means your customers like to talk and interact with you. And if they talk and interact with you offten, that means your sales numbers should be high. If you aren't talking to your customer often and have great revenue, imagine if you both communited more often! An increase in engagement could improve loyalty, which could also increase revenue. 

By reviewing these relationships and their influence on revenue, you could see your organization through new eyes and identify business and revenue opportunities that you never previously considered. 

If business success is based on conversations and interactions between people, and you aren’t somehow measuring how those conversations to build relationships with your customers and to eventually create a community, you may not notice how they are impacting revenue. Salespeople notice this every day. Your customers feel this every day. Look past revenue to find the missing ingredient. It probably lies in how you are engaging with your customers. 

How do we do this?

The voting membership determines which methodologies and metrics developed and tested should be adopted as a business standard. 

We will be leveraging approaches from scientific research and strongly encourage that consulting firms and businesses include academics in this process to ensure data integrity. All approaches presented to the voting membership for review will be validated through reproduceable results.  

The process includes five step to get a methdology for metrics approved:

• Teams in consulting firms and companies define methodologies that can be shared with other companies to improve their bottom line and make other determinations. 
• The voting membership determines if these approaches should be tested for validation.
• Member companies implement these approaches to determine that they can reproduce results (and enjoy the benefits in their own organizations). 
• Once these results are replicated to prove that they are effective, the membership votes on which metric outputs from the methodologies should be considered to be business standards for relationship metrics. 
• If successful, then the methodology and metrics become a standard that can then be implemented in companies across industries and leveraged to communicate other relationship factors.

These metrics could then be used in investor presentations, new program proposals, and in annual reports as indicators and signals to support new strategies and activities.