Relationship Capital, Starting With Your Customers

As with human capital, relationship capital has always been a part of business.

Organizations have always had customers, vendors and financing partners, to name a few. But the nature of these relationships has been changing more dramatically in recent years. First of all, networking technology has made it easier to outsource pieces of a business that were formerly inside the corporation. The relationships with critical outsourcing partners are closer than that of arms-length client-vendor relationships.

You may find yourself on both sides of this dynamic, performing outsourced services for your customers but also outsourcing some of your internal processes to a vendor. Read more

Why Do Your Customers Pay You for Your Knowledge?

Last week, I focused on how your company gets paid for its knowledge. Today, I’d like to focus on why your customers are willing to pay you.

This question is all the more acute given my post on Friday about the need to give away knowledge. This fact means that focusing exclusively on how you get paid will force you to miss some of the critical knowledge that distinguishes your organization.

In most cases, your customer is “buying” the whole package whether they pay for it or not, just as Google’s advertising are buying access to the users of the free service. So to understand Google’s search business or your own, you have to understand more than just the knowledge for which they get paid.

To identify the full picture of your critical knowledge, it is helpful then to move beyond the concept of products and services and ask three questions. Read more