GrowthX - Build the Relationships

In the What Insights Drive Change session of our Driving Innovation Now webinar series, we learned how to find the right insights that would lead to the right behaviors to drive change. View the blog post from our 3rd webinar here or request access to the webinar and presentation. 

In our fourth session with Sean Sheppard, Founding Partner of GrowthX & GrowthX Academy, we focused on Building the Relationships necessary for that big idea to take hold with your early customers. Here are some of the key takeaways:

The first objective is to take the learning outcomes and use them to create a trustful relationship with our learning partners and turn trust into a competitive advantage. In Sean Sheppard words: “Trust is the operating system of successful relationships”. 

So, how do we do that? Through shared experiences and mutually beneficial outcomes. 

The idea is now that you have real data coming back for your use case, you’re learning and hopefully growing together, and developing a shared experience that benefits everyone. The key point is to collaborate with our customers to learn and see how we can solve the problem, showing that you have the best of intentions.

How do we accelerate this process? 

• Be that authentic and enthusiastic chief learner and bring your partners inside the organization along for the ride. Remember that feedback is a gift!
• Use mirroring: it allows you to mirror the verbal and nonverbal communication style of your partners inside the organization, so that you can become more trustworthy to them.
• Constantly pay close attention to your learning partner. Don’t ever assume that things are going well in their world or they think the same way you do.
• Show vulnerability. What we don’t know is more important than what we do know and it is ok if you show them that you don’t have all the answers.  
• Demonstrate that you do what you say. At the end of the day, your actions have to follow your words.

From Trust to Truth: An authentic pursuit of the truth will build trustful, lasting and deeper relationships (in spite of your outcomes) with your customers. 

Deep Conversation Framework:

• Create a safe space for people to tell you the truth.
• Build a collaborative environment for openly discussing data, make it easy for everyone to share and work through learnings together. 
• Use the Dashboard of Truth you created in session 3 to guide your conversations.
• Make data conversations an everyday activity.
• Use the 80/20 Rule: Ask questions, then shut up and listen 80 percent of the tome and keep asking why until you get to the heart of the matter. 

3 steps:

• Data Kudos: Create a system to celebrate and congratulate every learning no matter how small. 
• Data Reflections: Schedule time to reflect on learnings as frequently as feasible. 
• Data Sharing: Share key pieces of data with your stakeholders as frequently as feasible. 

Once we’ve done that, how do we land and expand? Become a Data Champion:

• Create a shared language, understanding the words your customers use and allow them to organically grow through your customer’s organization. 
• Start to ask stakeholders how you can help others in the organization. 
• Encourage your learning partners to look for evidence, corroboration and triangulation by answering: What did I see? What data supported or refuted that observation? What’s my hypothesis of why that occurred? That should be the objective outcome of every learning experience.

Plug into a Network and Champion Your Data:

• Avoid isolation, you should recruit as many stakeholders as you can to discuss what’s working, what’s not and what they could be doing differently. 
• Connect with other data-driven leaders by joining or starting a Professional Learning Community where the shared focus is on data reflection and action. 

Once you have established that, it is now time to go! Constantly build an account based strategy, champion your data to key stakeholders, identify new adjacent innovation opportunities, repeat the five step Big Idea process with each opportunity and collaborate and communicate. And that's how you expand your opportunities to get into more relationships.

Homework: 

1. Build a Deep Conversation Framework.
2. Create a Shared Language.
3. Build Account Based Land and Expand Strategy.

If you missed the webinar, would like access to the video or the presentation, or would like to discuss your innovation initiative with Sean directly, please drop a note to [email protected] or complete this form. 

This conversation was brought to you as part of the GrowthX webinar sessions. Join us next week for Part 5 --the Path to Monetization in our Driving Innovation NOW series.