The External Sphere of Influence: Customers, Peers and Influencers, and Strategic Vendor Partners

The external sphere of influence includes business relationships where you have less direct impact: customers, peers and influencers, and strategic vendor partners.

Create and nurture working relationships with customers by seeking to understand their goals and aspirations, delivering value, and genuinely caring about their success. This will build trust and brand loyalty.

Whether you are working in your own enterprise or providing services to an external customer, you need to know who your peers and influencers are. Peers are at the same level that you are in an organization. Influencers can be at any level in an organization. Once you identify who they are, you need to understand how you can help each other.

“Vendor” implies a short transactional relationship, like you have with a vending machine. I became a strategic vendor by understanding the goals and aspirations of my customers by building the relationship beyond a transaction. When I was on the customer side of the desk, my goal was to build mutually beneficial relationships with vendors we deemed strategic.