The Silent Killer: How a PM's complacency cost his company millions

Tom was the program manager of your company’s longest-running program. Like most PMs, he was swamped and didn't have time to waste on non-project-related tasks like relationship development.

He already had a great relationship with his Defense Department customers. There were never any communication issues. He quickly resolved operation problems, and they often shared jokes or chatted about sports or weekend happenings.

Tom's company had been the incumbent on this program for over 20 years, and there was little doubt they would retain it. Although the recompete RFP contained a few surprises – Tom remained confident, saying, "Don't worry; we got this… they love us."

Tom couldn't have been more wrong!

The award went to a competitor, and while they celebrated their win, Tom's organization was in shock.

Sound familiar?

The High Cost of Overestimated Relationships

Tom assumed his casual chit-chat meant he had good customer intimacy. Why wouldn't he? His organization didn't have a standard definition or any objective ways for him to measure customer intimacy.

Tom's story isn't unique. A 2019 Lone Star Analysis found that 40% of incumbents lose recompetes because of overestimated customer relationship quality. So, there is a good chance this silent killer has struck your organization, leaving you to endure the frustration, embarrassment, and anger of explaining to your leadership how a competitor just won your 'sure thing.'

Why Do We Overestimate Relationship Quality?

The answer often lies in human nature and workplace dynamics. Let's explore some of these:

1. Misreading Casual Engagements: Small talk and jokes are mistaken for customer intimacy.
2. Confirmation Bias: People seek evidence confirming their belief that the relationship is strong, ignoring negative signs.
3. Misinterpreted Courtesy: Professional politeness is often confused with intimacy.
4. Lack of Honest Feedback: Customers' reluctance to provide honest feedback creates a false sense of security.

These result in limited intel gathering and increase the likelihood of assumptions being presented as validated facts in opportunity or gate reviews.

Preventative Measures

As a leader, you must prevent Tom's situation. Here are two steps you can take:

1. Watch for the Warning Sign

Individuals often miss the subtle human clues crucial to relationship success. These invisible weaknesses in your customer relationships are like a cancer that goes undetected until the damage is irreversible. Watch out for:

• Limited Engagement: Not engaging the customer outside formal status or review meetings.
• One-Way Communication: Your team eagerly provides capability briefings, white papers, demos, and solutions but gets little intelligence in return.
• Limited Account Penetration: Relationships are limited to operational contacts or the same customer stakeholders without more strategic customer engagement.
• Generic Intel: Gathering the same intel as your competitors - offering your proposal team no competitive discriminators.

Often, when you identify these symptoms, you may already be at risk of losing the opportunity.

2. Define Relationship Quality and Measure it.

You can't improve what you can't measure, and you can't consistently measure something that is poorly defined. Most organizations don't have an agreed definition or way to measure Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ), leaving this to individual interpretation, unvalidated assumptions, and misinterpretation.

Many organizations use the HI-Q Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment to overcome this. This 6-level scale (hostile to collaborative relationships) standardizes definitions and objectively self-assesses an individual's customer relationship quality.

A CRQ assessment is valuable for validating your team's quality assumptions. It also provides a way to track relationship quality at individual, account, and opportunity levels. Think of this assessment as the 'canary in the coal mine' providing the warning needed before it's too late and the silent killer strikes again.

Closing Thoughts

Tom's story is a stark reminder of how relationship quality often separates winners from losers. Don't let complacency and denial cost your organization millions like Tom's.

Wouldn't you prefer to know early if your team has the relationship quality needed to win or who within your organization has the best relationships with a new stakeholder?

Remember, Tom thought he had this in the bag because the customer loved them. And his leaders had no objective way to measure this!

If they had been using the Hi-Q CRQ tool, they would have seen that Tom's relationship was, at best transactional, and he wasn't as well positioned as he thought. This might have been enough to keep their flagship contract and stop the silent killer before it struck.

With over 20 years in the Government market, Nic Coppings, a Senior Partner at Hi-Q Group, has been pivotal in helping teams secure billions in contract wins by enhancing their customer relationships and intelligence quality. Hi-Q training programs go beyond theory, equipping teams with 'how' to forge Winning Relationships and weaponize customer intelligence. Want to know more about the HI-Q CRQ Tool – schedule a time to chat here.