Do You & Your Account Relationships Share Ingredients With Long-Term Couples

Clickbait, I know. But sometimes you simply cave in. Would you have too? How they stay together: what 68 long-term couples taught me about love. In a farewell letter, How We Stay Together columnist Alexandra Spring shares the three ingredients to an enduring relationship.

These being the triploid of long-term love;

Shared values – with such often figured out early on.
The art of compromise – they have learnt to compromise for each other.
A bit of grit – the number one thing that almost every couple spoke about was commitment: a shared agreement to hang in there, no matter what.

Whilst hardly scientific, these trio do offer up tantalising analogous Vendor-Buyer dynamics.

Shared values can indeed emerge at the very outset. For instance, are they after cheap, quick and dirty? Or realise the reward in getting what you pay for? How fair a price do they intend to pay and does it match your level?

Yet in solution selling – and by mirror, solution buying – many other outlooks that may distinguish us also come into view early. Considering such as delivery, installation, implementation, maintenance, training, upgrades.

Not to mention how they go about their business. Are you a matching pair when it comes to desire for growth, geographic or product range expansion, acquisitiveness, refresh rates, or their place on the adoption scale?

The art of compromise can reveal itself in their relative position on the totally bespoke to off-the-shelf continuum. I sense the obvious metaphor with deal negotiation style less important as how they approach ongoing management of the wares we provide.

And a bit of grit, as manifest in the degree that shared commitment to joint success is exhibited, can perhaps be glimpsed by how prompt they respond to our requests pre-sale, what they themselves ask for, and the manner in which these are provided.

Then add-on potential monitoring, alert and control procedures they tend to deploy themselves and decide if these work for you too.

How do your forecast deals’ people stack up against these when compared to you?