Ramesh Dorairaj on Games Customers Play

But if you go one step further, most relationships survive and are characterized by a balance of power. And a series of interactions that make up that relationship determine who has the edge over the other. This much is known to nearly all relationship counselors, marriage counselors, psychologists. This is nothing new that I’m talking about. But what is interesting is that you can either say, “I treat somebody or something, I treat the other party as something. And not really as a person. I really don’t give too much weight to what that person is or what their challenges are, who they are, even what their name is. But there are some relationships where I’m absolutely certain that I need to know everything about the person that I can so that I can have a very healthy relationship with that person.” So Daniel Goleman, in his book “Social Intelligence,” not “Emotional Intelligence,” which is his more famous book, but in “Social Intelligence,” talks about this, either treating a person as you or as an it. And it’s a continuum, of course. It’s not completely it, or completely you. And what he says is that when there is an expectation mismatch, if somebody wants to be treated as a you, but gets treated as an it, there comes a problem.

He says a surprisingly large amount of relationship issues stem from this single factor of expectation versus actual treatment being different along this axis. I was wondering why not make it into a two-by-two and have on one axis how the seller treats the buyer. There is an it or a you, and on the other axis, how the buyer treats the seller. So I came up with this quadrant and you really look at it, the lower left-hand quadrant is the transactional quadrant. This is where both parties treat each other as an it. You don’t really worry about the bus conductor’s name when you’re buying the ticket. Neither does he worry about the name. It’s money given, ticket taken. It’s a transaction. The transaction is the most important thing, and not who is doing it or how it’s being done, with what level of deference and respect it’s being done. Now on the other extreme is when both parties treat each other as you, as a person. You find it with doctors in most cases, with coaches. But in most cases, both the parties are by necessity compelled to know each other fairly well. In a professional setting, when it comes to a doctor or a psychologist or a counselor, a consultant or a coach, these are all relationships in the personal quadrant.

Buyer tyranny happens when there is excessive power with the buyer. It’s a fragmented market. There are too many players who are willing to give you. There are multiple alternates that the customer can consume. But some of us who are old enough to know or remember BSNL and MTNL, the telephone line, telephone companies of India in the ’80s and the ’90s, you would know that the telephone lineman was a VIP. Now, of course, there’s been a severe backlash against them, and hardly anyone uses BSNL except in certain remote villages where there are no good alternatives available. That is serotonin. The fundamental human nature when it comes to interactions, group versus group interactions, individual versus individual interactions has been studied for a very long time by anthropologists and sociologists, and they’ve all come to a very surprising conclusion. And all human interactions, all human relationships are made of a composite of these four in different proportions. So that’s the science behind this model that I have proposed. And fundamentally, when you’re looking at selling, you have to look at these quadrants. You have to look at these not just because of the overall superficial categorization, but because there is an underlying depth of human emotions and evolutionary developments that actually make this much more relevant when it comes to selling and servicing customers.

And so, what should be your primary posture to the market? So given these quadrants, I just want to put a very quirky, strange question here. Would you ask Govinda? Would you put him as the brand ambassador for a Montblanc pen? So what is your primary posture to the market? When it comes to your positioning, particularly when it comes to trying to position yourself in alignment with what the market expects, what your customers expect out of you, what I have seen happening is what I call an oxymoronic position. You can’t have an obedient trusted advisor. One of the examples that I can give is when Infosys in the early 2000s hired Steve Pratt. Steve Pratt at that point in time was rated as one of the top 10 business consultants in the world by Forbes. So Infosys hired him so that he could develop this consulting service and make this trusted advisor positioning that Infosys really wanted to have because they saw how IBM, how other companies had been able to do it. And they really wanted to copy them, not just copy them, follow that path to greater profitability, sustainability, and all of that.

But it didn’t work out. We, in fact, hired quite a few people. We brought in a team, but it didn’t work. I think it was probably an experiment that lasted five, six years, and then we had to abandon it. The reason is that the whole of the organization was primarily in the buyer tyranny and the transactional quadrants at that time. The entire delivery process, the marketing, customer relationship, the governance around it, all of it was focused on how do we get these margins? How do we deliver on time? How do we deliver quality? How do we do all that? It was not about how do we listen to the customer and do what they ask us to do in the most efficient, optimized way possible. It was never about questioning what the customer wanted you to do. And since the organization was completely tuned towards that, there was no way that adding a little layer of consulting on top, but with the rest of the organization being completely obedient, helped. So some of the positioning has to be in relation to the quadrant, and it has to be congruent across three stages of the customer’s experience.

The customer gets your service or product, uses it, and when something goes wrong, has to fix it. For instance, if it’s a product that you’ve sold for the transactional quadrant, the use also has to be frictionless. And when there is some trouble, the fixing of it also has to be frictionless. We’re now delving a little deeper into sales. For instance, some of the personal quadrant selling has to be either in terms of consultative selling or the Challenger method. It could be a combination of both, where the client expects you to know their business intimately and come up with insights, come up with something that challenges their status quo and say, hey, this is a way of doing it better, why don’t you try it? At the same time, if the client just wants some commoditized service, but you start asking for this, for details. Take a very prosaic example. Assume that you’re a 200-people organization looking for some canteen provider to provide lunch for your employees. And you have a very small dining room, and they just have to come, deliver the food, and go away. And in walks these two consultants with guides and everything and introduce themselves as nutrition and dietetics experts and say, Okay, we want a profile of your employees, their ages, their blood work, if you have them, their health profiles and patterns, so that for each of them we can customize the lunch.

I don’t know if I’m giving a startup idea right now, but assume that you do that, someone does that. What do you think will be the reaction of the person wanting to get those canteen services? They’ll say, No, we just want some standard menu— deliver, clean up, get out. That’s what we want. So there, it’s the costing, it’s the ease of buying, it’s the ease of fixing, it’s the ease of measuring quality. Those are the things that are important, not these questions that these people are asking. So anchor your selling method to suit the quadrant. Once you determine which quadrant this relationship is going to be in, anchor your selling method accordingly. One of the questions I keep getting asked is how do we escape buyer tyranny? I’m sure that most of our biases in our relationships as a seller, I can see are in the buyer tyranny segment. Careful— for all you know, most of our relationships may not be in the buyer tyranny quadrant. There are a lot of indicators and external factors that can determine where you are, what relationship quadrant there is between you and the buyer. So first check, because it’s very easy to label ourselves as being in a difficult quadrant.

But if you are, it’s not easy to move to the personal quadrant directly. I think I just shared that example with you. There are others because given that the service is rapidly commoditizing or has already commoditized, any amount of investment to understand the customer, get closer to the customer will be expensive. And in many cases, actually rebuffed by the customer. So given that, try to move to the transactional part, and we’ll talk about examples. And then if you can, look at some of those services that can be moved to the personal quadrant where the margins justify your movement. So moving to the transactional quadrant, I think the private banks did a bang-up job of it by moving most of your financial transactions, cash transactions to the ATM. I mean, earlier, it used to be a pain. You had to stand in a queue to collect money from a teller who used to take their own sweet time dealing with the cash, and sometimes even slip in a bad note. Can you now imagine going to a bank and doing business with a bank that doesn’t have an ATM? That moved the service to that pure transactional quadrant.

You could drop a product or service. IBM found the laptop business being a completely commoditized market, and therefore they just sold it to Lenovo and did much better after that. So these are choices that you have to escape the buyer tyranny and the quadrant. And you could also try some of the little tricks that other companies have done. Asian Paints, which was at the mercy of painters and interior decorators— they chose what paints they wanted, etc. And so Asian Paints brought in this layer of service where they came into your house, and they helped you visualize how this house would look like. And by default, you’re going to buy their paints. And so they bundled this entire interior visualization service with paint mixing services, and voila, they were able to move out of the buyer tyranny quadrant because this paint market was so much controlled by the interior decorators and the painters. So summarizing, business relationships are fundamentally based on power dynamics, and oxymoronic positioning debilitates your company’s sustainable profitability and existence. Try to position, sell, and negotiate based on the quadrant of your relationship, and calibrate the distance to your customers, how frictionless or how interactive it has to be, based on the relationship quadrant.

So who am I? I’m a sales and proposal coach, and I help customers sell better. I fine-tune their sales engine right from their initial messages to the market down to proposals and negotiations. What do you think? Thank you. And thank you, Subhanjan once again.

Subhanjan Sarkar
That was a very intense session again. Do get hold of his book. I think there’s a lot of input and as I said the more I’m hearing the sessions, the more I’m liking them but we are running late and Peter is waiting. He’s a great guy, you’ll see in a moment. He’s done some fascinating things but most importantly we’ll talk about his latest book in a moment.