In conversation with Max Baldwin, Group Sales and Marketing Director, NCC Group
Why context is king: building relationships that last
Max Baldwin is Group Sales and Marketing Director at NCC Group, a business specialising in global cybersecurity. His experience in strategic leadership spans multiple sectors, including global IT services, energy, education and defence and security.
One of your goals is achieving sustainable growth. What does this mean to you?
In the business world, growth is everything – but it must be the right kind. Service provision and relationships with clients need to match the need: if it’s transactional, then make it easy and fast to deliver, and if it’s problem-solving, then the relationship needs to sustain and evolve as challenges and opportunities arise. In this kind of evolving relationship, we suppliers constantly need to prove our value. When value is easy to see, partnerships become ‘stickier’ and both parties enjoy the benefits – suppliers receive more work and clients evolve towards their strategy thanks to the additional support.
Creating sustainable relationships requires more than simply finding any new client. As sales teams, we need to work harder to fully understand each client’s needs, so that we can align and design seamless services that prepare them for the business challenges ahead.
In what ways do you prove your value to clients?
When the relationship is working well, we don’t need to try and prove our value to clients, the service we deliver should speak for itself! But that doesn’t mean we sit back, we are always looking for ways to stay ahead of our clients’ needs.
Once initial services are in place, we suppliers need to continually work on our outputs and improve them to stay relevant. Fine-tuning our approach goes beyond getting feedback and acting on it. We need to be proactive to highlight any possible stumbling blocks and opportunities to clients, so that we can help prime their business for the future. With this foresight, we can make sure the service they receive from us is always better than they would get elsewhere. It is a better service because it is tailored to them and their real operational and strategic needs. That is why customer context is so important to a sustainable relationship.
How do you learn more about your clients’ real needs?
You might imagine that the answer to this would simply be ‘we ask them’, but this isn’t quite right. Often, clients don’t really know what service they need. They know the immediate challenges they are facing, but won’t necessarily understand the best services to help or may not be able to predict difficulties around the corner. As experts, it is our job to listen, but also to apply our own knowledge of the landscape (in our case, the cybersecurity and cyber threats), so that we can deliver more robust support. Getting to this stage – where we fully understand our clients and what they truly need – relies on both sides being open and honest with each other.
In what ways do you establish an open dialogue with new clients?
Over the last few years there has been a tangible move towards openness in client-provider conversations, which is helping us dig deeper into our clients’ needs and their operational situation. Often, people see openness as encouraging clients to give honest feedback at the end of a project, but we aim to bring that dialogue into the relationship as early as possible. Doing so gives us a great opportunity to understand more about our clients from the very start, so that we can build our service around their needs and simply tweak it as we get to know them even more.
To encourage an open dialogue with new clients, we delve into the environment in which they operate. Understanding their context is key to creating a service that makes a more tangible difference to their business. For us, knowing the context is the difference between delivering a service that does the job and delivering a service that does a great job and adds long term value.
What contextual understanding do you find most valuable to long-term client relationships?
When we talk about context, we mean the clients’ unique situation. This is largely covered by the business case (the why, what, how and who of the undertaking), which sets the goal we are aiming to achieve. These details are the basics though. They often cover the project itself rather than day-to-day life in the business, and we need wider contextual information on the people, processes, systems and regulatory frameworks to create the most frictionless service.
Learning about implementation challenges they have faced in the past, what has worked and what hasn’t, and their preferred way of working is vital for us to ensure we get the right answer for them. We also ask stakeholders about their personal goals, so that we can create a service that works in support of, rather than against, their ambitions.
In what ways do you see client relationships changing in the future?
I think honesty is really coming to the fore now, and I expect this to continue. The old saying of ‘the answer is always yes’ doesn’t apply now. If you say yes to everything, you often find yourself doing a subpar job. That’s why I see a lot of power in saying no.
If you can’t truly meet a prospective client’s needs, then it’s better to recommend an alternative provider or solution – one that fits the need. That way, they will trust you as an expert and know that you genuinely want to help them. This helps both them and you – when the prospective client does need the service your business offers, you can bet they’ll be back in touch.
We need to care (be interested), share (be open) and dare (lead the approach to deliver the best outcome for the client).
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