This week, I’m thinking more deeply about relationships. (Don’t worry, this is not another Valentine’s Day post! But if you are interested in that, read the post on Brand Love).
Seeking connection is the human condition. Yet, too often the dominant narrative surrounding entrepreneurs leans toward a focus on hard work ethic, product-market fit and chasing investment. While all of this is important, nurturing strong relationships, I would argue, is where most value is created in a business. We often overlook the importance of strong connections, building social capital and nurturing our relationships (inside and outside the company) in favor of profit maximizing activities with short-term results. Relationships are how we build trust, influence and ultimately, long-term, sustainable growth. So ignoring how different stakeholders impact your business means high-stakes.
There’s a tool that I use in my class, that helps evaluate high-stakes relationships of all kinds. (By the way, the Bard MBA Program in Sustainability was ranked #1 Green MBA and #9 for Nonprofits by Princeton Review — woohoo! 🙌🏾 ).
One of the first frameworks I introduce to students in my course on Stakeholders & Marketing focuses on completing an assessment of stakeholders — it’s commonly known as stakeholder mapping. This exercise requires you to rate the influence (or power) and interest (or connection) of all of your organization’s stakeholders — this means segmenting your customers, while also including employees, suppliers, investors and community members, where it make sense. Doing so gives you an opportunity to assess how you engage with them and prioritize resources (i.e., time, energy and budgets).
This is a case study
Let me share a simple example. This newsletter that I have started has one main category of stakeholders, with a few types. All of you are subscribers. Some of you are paid subscribers, and the rest of you are on the free subscription plan. I care a lot about the experience that all of you have, but I might pay closer attention to some of you who pay to read this, as well as anyone highly engaged with the content, or who has a large following on social media — maybe you’re an influencer. There are many characteristics that matter to decide how to segment your stakeholder groups, but for simplicity, I will focus on paid vs. free subscriptions of this newsletter.
Assessing power. Those of you that paid for your subscription, I would say, have greater influence in what I publish than a free subscriber. Paying for something puts us in a relationship. You help fund this experiment, in exchange for quality content. This is our implicit agreement. Within the paid subscribers group there are also two tiers — those of you that pay monthly or annually in one group; and the second is the group known as the Founder’s Circle. Those second tier subscribers pay more to work with me directly. I am working very closely with this group of subscribers, as clients, meeting with them about their business, in one-on-one monthly advising sessions.
The relative power these different paid subscriber groups have might be debated; since, I am the publisher, I still hold the power over editorial decision-making right now. So far, I have not asked any subscribers about what they want to read. Although I do welcome feedback, paid subscribers have very little influence over what I write every day. Greater power might instead sit with those in the Founder’s Circle that I meet with monthly to gauge their business needs. Those one-on-one sessions create a lot of value in both directions and do impact what I write about; when I experience an ah-ha moment, as I have this week, I make a note for a future post. In this example, the group of subscribers in the Founder’s Circle wield the highest power and influence on what you might read here in the future.
Measuring interest. Paid subscribers might hold high interest, or connection, to this newsletter and its content, because inherent in our agreement is the idea that, by reading what I write, they will gain something. In this case, I have to closely manage all paid subscribers pretty closely to ensure they are satisfied with this product. Now, the rest of you free subscribers have varying levels of interest I have to consider.
Some of you may have never read another post since signing up the first time; others of you read this newsletter infrequently. Hundreds of you are avid readers — you reply to my emails directly, or comment, like, share and forward posts to your friends. (I’m so grateful that’s happening.) You are my highest value, free subscribers that I want to keep informed about what’s happening each week.
The rest of you might simply not have the time, or are apathetic — there’s no harm in saying that here, if it’s true. Perhaps you are unsure — yet — what value you will derive from this blog. Maybe you like what I am writing, but you haven’t felt comfortable liking, commenting or sharing posts yet for some reason. You are my latent subscribers, whom I want to engage more with and convert to promoters — if only I could just figure out how to motivate you to do that. That may take some time, but I’ve figured out who you are already, and that’s the point of this exercise.
I probably worry most about latent readers. Even if you are not reading frequently, when you do read a post, you might not like the topic, find my advice underwhelming, or the resources not useful. One bad experience might lead to you unsubscribing, or worse. Ultimately, it’s better that I understand how to increase the value of this newsletter for everyone. So, I have quite some work ahead of me to keep this latent group satisfied, and to get all of you subscribers talking about these posts. Now, it’s my job to make that easy for you — see share button below. 🤓
Beware those detractors
I have had some people unsubscribe from my newsletter. I don’t take that personally. We all have to decide how we spend our time, and I admire those of you that practice zero-inbox habits. In general, comments from readers are positive and the feedback constructive. That will likely be a short-lived experience for me, if I am lucky enough to keep this newsletter going. Since I do hope to stir some healthy provocations through this newsletter, it is likely that I will deal with detractors.
In a scenario where you might be experiencing poor customer reviews, or low employee satisfaction, this is cause for concern. And when that happens, we have to decide how urgent and important a detractor’s comment is to address. Just think about what one bad review on Yelp does to a small business owner’s 5-star rating. Decimal points can make the difference to prospective customers.
Detractors will impact a brand’s reputation over time, and that can be harder to recover from. When we respond swiftly, it might resolve itself quickly. But managing detractors can also suck up energy, time and resources, that make it difficult to justify trying to get that customer back. Mind you, this can also happen with prospective or former employees, as well as suppliers, and community activists. Investors too. But just like with investors, when we seek patient capital and mission-alignment, sometimes we are better off putting an extra effort to find new audiences and communities that value what we are doing.
From a Sex and the City episode, I’ll leave you with this now classic line: He’s just not that into you. Instead of wasting time courting people who are just not interested, move on. In my experience, the defenders of the community tend to outweigh dissatisfied customers. That’s how stakeholder mapping helps evaluate those high-stakes relationships.
Knowing whether you are working with high-stakes relationships empowers leadership. However, evaluating your stakeholder relationships doesn’t have to be a high-stakes process. Stakeholder mapping helps paint a clearer picture of our relationships, and it just might be the ones we avoid analyzing that get us in trouble.
Onward, my People.
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