Enterprise Relationship Intelligence. What is it and why is it so important in the hybrid working world?

“Companies that focus on building loyal relationships, that by their very nature keep costs to a minimum, are far better positioned to remain strong in the face of market turbulence.*”

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The current problem set

As commercial relationships have shifted from in-person to digital, three key challenges have emerged: there are more clients per revenue generator than before, more client touch-points and less visibility of client needs; we have lost the human touch. We no longer know who is interested or how interested they are, so we give up on some new business opportunities too early and hang on to some dead deals for too long. Juggling the growing number of relationships and touch-points is increasingly challenging, which leads to clients leaving without warning and a higher cost of sales.

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Where we are moving to

Helping people cross the digital-divide and cutting through the noise in this complex, high-speed, multi-dimensional client relationship ecosystem requires a new approach. We need new systems that are able to discover hidden signals in our data to help people be more effective so that they can close more deals, developer stronger relationships and maximise client retention. The better insights and signals people have into their clients’ needs, the more competitive they will be. FeedStock has designed, built and launched a new way to help understand client relationships: Enterprise relationship Intelligence, which is uniquely positioned to address the specific pain points that the digital divide has created, and is here to help people serve their clients faster and better.

Allow me to use a familiar concept to introduce a new idea: a football analogy.

When watching a game, a manager can see his players. He can see who passes to who, who scores and he can make some anecdotal judgement about who is working hard, who is tackling well and who is having a great game. The individual player also has some idea of how well they are playing. What neither manager, nor player, can see is an instantaneous, real-time view of how each of their passes contributes to winning goals, against which opponents those passes were most important, where a pass might have been better placed elsewhere, which players are full of energy and which are growing tired, and where they needed to put in more effort to come away with the desired outcome: a win. Imagine what a team could achieve if it were armed with that intelligence in real-time.

ERI in context

Why now? Well, increasing client retention rates by as little as 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Added to this is the fact that 90% of clients leave without complaining, and it costs 5 to 7 times more to gain a client than to maintain one. Clearly, the risk to business profitability of getting client relationships wrong is one to be avoided at all costs. In the same way that a good goal is the product of many well-executed passes, leads and player moves off the ball, a successfully managed client account requires a highly nuanced understanding of the actors that are taking part in the decision-making process on both sides. There is currently no system in place that equips businesses and their revenue generators with this level of nuanced understanding. FeedStock’s ERI system is the answer to the increasingly complex, high-value client relationships that characterise today’s services industries.

What does ERI do?

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ERIs make building and maintaining client relationships easy, effective and profitable. They are predicated on two key features:

1. Superior data streams, automatically captured across all client interaction streams.
2. The application of deep learning algorithms to extract and distil actionable insights about a client-base in real-time, to help client-focussed teams deliver for their customers. Providing alerts, key indicators and relationship scoring systems to turbo-charge client relationships.

ERIs empower and motivate revenue generators of all seniority levels to perform at their best. Relationships across the high-value services industries are being transformed by ERIs and there will be no looking back.

ERIs addressing the remote working challenge

On top of that: successfully managing internal relationships is as important as external ones. In today’s remote working environment, a business’s ability to collaborate effectively has become increasingly difficult. There is an urgent need for a system which clarifies and visually depicts how colleagues within an organization are positioned to maximise opportunities and minimise risks within their client base. To extend the football analogy still further, would David Beckham have received a football boot to the face from Alex Ferguson if they’d had the ability to instantly receive objective, impartial effort scores for Beckham’s performance in the game versus Arsenal? Probably not.

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Where Synapse fits in this

We are applying this level of data analysis to client relationships and team actions, unlike anyone has done before. FeedStock’s ERI system, Synapse, processes millions of data points per person per day to automatically analyse internal and external activities across clients, companies, colleagues, and content. Our ERI system sheds light on the increasingly complex B2B digital client ecosystem so revenue generators (players) and managers can win the client relationship game.

References:

Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, Prescription for cutting costs: Loyal relationships (Link)

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