Persistence - Value of Long Term Relationships

This could is halfway between a business concept and a human concept.

There is huge value to be had with sticking with persisting in client relationships even when perhaps the account appears to have be ‘won’ by another vendor. For example Mercy Healthcare recently gave the winning bid to Intersystems to be their new ‘enterprise’ engine. The politics of the account is the the management of the company like us since we’ve been good to them with supporting a Chameleon based plugin that Tibco used with them. But the interface development team was more in the Intersystems camp.

But these things are never over. By maintaining a positive helpful relationship we will continue to have opportunities to grow what we do with the account. People generally will choose to do business with people they like the relationship they have and by sticking with Mercy, when Intersystems stumbles and doesn’t give them the relationship that they expect, then we have opportunity which comes from being a steady reliable partner that is good to deal with.

On the flip side when we ‘own’ an account, the same principle applies to us. If we do not invest in maintaining a relationship with an account we run the risk that our competitors will invest the time in maintaining a dialog and they will be the one the account turns to for a new project.

Re-iterating on that theme, all the other thing we do feed into this long term focus:

• We are investing in product development - so they won’t need to pull us out and replace us in the future

• We are here, we are listening and helping them address concerns of their organization - i.e. budget, meeting deadlines and keeping their data safe.

• We keep on maintaining trust.