When businesses look at their operation, their products and services, and their culture and ethos, they often fail to recognise what makes them great.
Customers are a business’s lifeblood and their willingness to part with their money to buy our products and services allows us to grow our business.
What businesses get from their suppliers is the ability to add value to their customers
It is worth remembering though that our businesses are also customers of our suppliers. What businesses get from their suppliers is the ability to add value to their customers. Of course, that continues up the supply chain to supplier’s suppliers and down to customer’s customers.
Sometimes the business supplying the supplier is critical to our ability to deliver for our customers and likewise, sometimes it is our customer’s customer which is reliant on us. We may not know that, but if we did, it could change our priorities.
In Braveheart, on the Battlefield, William Wallace rode to a group of nobles seeking to negotiate and ordinary folk seeking to survive. Ok, perhaps not the perfect analogy with business relationships, but the effect is similar.
Who should collaborate?
It is often difficult to identify among potential suppliers the ones that really matter.
It’s good business practice to examine your profitable lines, to understand where the money comes from and where it goes. Cost-conscious businesses seek to negotiate down input costs, but doing so in a non-collaborative manner can lead to suppliers reducing quality or withdrawing supply.
Collaborative approaches with suppliers who understand the impact of change across the widest picture can enable businesses and suppliers to find the right solutions for both parties.
Collaborative approaches with customers helps ensure that your business adapts to changing customer needs and provides more market intelligence. Collaborative customers tend to be advocates and feel part of the ‘family’, and with this comes more loyalty.
In Braveheart, William Wallace understood this. He needed to get all the parties in the battle working together, for there were indeed too many well armoured men in the opposing forces.
What’s the common identity?
What Wallace did was create an immediate common identity that applied to all the men on the field of battle. ‘Sons of Scotland’ gave them a peg to hang their identity on.
The reaction in each of the men was that Wallace “is talking to me” and so each individual listened.
Can you identify the identity common to you and those around you in business? Does the language you use in your marketing and sales material talk at your market, or embrace them?
When you answer the phone, are you talking to a member of your business’s collaborative team, or just responding to a supplier or customer?
It’s hard to distill your identity into three words, as Wallace did.
In 1976, Frank Muir accepted the Rectorship of St Andrews’ University. In a moving speech he discarded his notes and talked about seeing the whole town from one of the high points in the town.
Opening his arms he said ‘this is my university’. The implication was that he was joining the assembled throng as an equal, and it helped assure the support of everyone at the university.
Where are you going?
A common identity is all well and good, but you also need a mission, a purpose and a direction to move forward. Businesses with a common purpose that is understood by all its staff tend to get support from their suppliers and customers.
When Virgin entered the transatlantic airline business they made clear what they hoped to achieve in relation to standards of service and cost, much of which wasn’t deliverable on day one. And in Braveheart, Wallace use a similar tactic, recognising straightaway a common feature of his team, saying, “I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny”, thus confirming that they were all free men.
He addressed current concerns (“run and you may live”), but painted a picture of a future requiring action today. His most famous statement – “And looking back, many years from now, would you trade all the days from that day to this for one chance to tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they can never take our freedom” – evokes the group’s passion, their belief in freedom and the need to take action now, and activates the binding force of collaboration.
In business we can paint an equivalent picture of the shared destination the actions we are taking, and will take, will take us.
What are the common features, in your collaborative group, that you can draw on? What is their equivalent of the fight against tyranny?
Express your goals in a way that builds on the passions of those around you, aligns those passions around a common goal and creates a shared journey, and you will make your business purposeful and resilient.
How do you unite the sceptics behind a shared vision?
Many battles in history were lost because, ultimately, the team wasn’t passionately aligned behind the goal. But bringing the team with you doesn’t mean painting a picture of milk and honey though.
In Braveheart, Wallace didn’t shy away from raising the spectre of death. Similarly, Churchill Warned his countrymen that he had nothing to offer but “blood, toils, tears and sweat” (a phrase first used by Theodore Roosevelt in 1897) at the dawn of the Battle of Britain.
Frank assessments and a clear belief that you and your business will prevail will bring the sceptical on board far more readily than overoptimistic portrayals of the future.
When our suppliers don’t share our passions we are just a supply of money to them. When the going gets tough they’re more likely to help those with whom they’ve built a shared vision.
Sir Stuart Rose understood this well, as when Marks and Spencer fell from grace, his job was not to resolve the issues overnight, but to rebuild the ‘contract’ that Marks and Spencer had built over many years with its customers for value and quality.
Our customers will feel no loyalty to us unless there is a shared journey, and a shared passion about to fulfil their needs.
The picture we paint of where we are going sends many messages, and the more that we can align those messages with our passions, the more we can bring our suppliers and customers on board.
Finding the powerful phrases that bind groups behind a common identity and a common journey will bind your business, your advocates, your suppliers and your customers into a collaborative group that will deliver more, faster and more reliably, than simply being a company that happens to buy from suppliers and sell to customers.
