Reimagining Client Relationships
CLIENT: Quintiles
SERVICES: Strategic Off-site, Workshop Design, Facilitation
CHALLENGE: How might we pivot from short-term sales to long-term relationships with clients?
TEAM: Curiosity Atlas – Me: Experience Design, Gretchen: Facilitation & Client relations, Shana: Visual Strategy
Quintiles needed a new competitive advantage, one that realizes the benefits of client relationships nurtured over time rather than quick, short-term sales.
The Quintiles team approached us with the concern for the changing dynamics within their industry and what that meant for sales. After a series of stakeholder interviews and discussions with the client, everyone realized a shift to away from short-term sales was needed to give the team a competitive advantage. Creating a customer experience with a sight on long-term relationships would mean reimagining everything–internal deliverables, expectations, offerings, and especially the interactions they had with their customers.
Our task was to create an experience to introduce the strategic shift in an inspiring way to build conviction, adoption, and engagement among sales leadership.
We identified umbrella themes to guide the design of a two-day retreat:
Maturity - relationships that build over time towards deeper understanding
Investment - today’s actions for tomorrow’s benefits
Cultivation - processes and practices that culminate in something greater
Ever the fans of learning from outside experts, we took the team into the slow world of wine.
The umbrella themes translated perfectly to the long-term perspective needed in wine-making–planting root stock, three-year growing cycles, barrel aging, blending, all the way to the glass.
Dr. Dick Peterson explains the need for grape growers to cultivate vines in anticipation of harvest
two years from now.
Winemaker Scott Harvey demonstrates blending to highlight the best aspects of the wine while anticipating the needs of your audience.
The analogy created the opportunity for the team to…
Explore the shift through an accessible but curious topic
Created a shared language for the team to use as they applied insights to their own offerings
Learn from an expert with decades of experience in long-term thinking in business and relationships
A communal experience to serve as a foundation for their new direction
The team used their lessons from grape growing and wine making as a lens to examine their current offerings and service gaps. After exploring the new opportunities long-term relationships created, we ushered the team through a series of exercises to ideate new offerings and internal rituals. Rough concepts were then turned into 30-day experiments they could use to prototype and learn.
By the end, the team had an intimate understanding of working with a long-term mentality, and the subtle rewards it reaps. Getting their own custom blend of wine didn't hurt either.
