Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Christina Spillane, and I'm here today to share with you the biggest secret that I have learned about being successful in business and in life, and that is the art and science of cultivating long-term relationships. I'm especially proud to be here today presenting at the Robsham Theater on the beautiful Boston College campus, because as it turns out, I've been here before. Over 29 years ago as a student at BC, there I am in the middle with the blonde hair and the Boston College sweatshirt on. This is how we study for finals the BC way. This picture was taken over three decades ago, but I'm proud to announce that I still am friends with a lot of the people in this photo. The woman on the very right, who's also named Christina, is my very best friend. Christina and I met freshman year on Newton campus, and we became roommates. Now whether it was because we had similar personalities or because I had a car freshman year and she needed a ride, but we became best friends. Today, Christina is a partner at a national law firm in New York City. After we left BC, we made sure to keep in touch and to be a source of support for each other over the years. She knows my family, and I know her family. And although we haven't connected as much as we would like after our time here, we certainly make an effort to be involved in each other's lives. A few years ago, I had needed a complicated legal concept explained to me. So I picked up the phone during the week, called Christina, and she was able to explain it to me in no problem. Why did she pick up the phone, being one of the best attorneys in New York during a weekday, and help me out? It's because we have cultivated a relationship of trust over the years, and this is called relationship ROI. For you non-business majors out there, ROI simply means return on investment. Here we are graduating from BC. I graduated from the Carroll School of Management with double degrees in finance and human resources. I absolutely loved my time at BC and cherished the bonds that I had made here and the relationships that have been lifelong and have started on this very campus. Before I go any further, I'm wondering, would you mind taking a brief survey for me? How likely are you to recommend, after the five minutes that I've been speaking to you, my TEDx talk to a friend or colleague member? Very likely, unlikely, undecided. Anyone need me to repeat the question? It seems silly after five minutes that I would ask you to evaluate me, doesn't it? I mean, how many of you were thinking, wow, this woman is majorly codependent? But big business does this every single day. That's because big business suffers from what I call premature evaluation. Premature evaluation, PEV, or PEV as I like to call it, is simply, to put it in a Seinfeld term, level-jumping the relationship by evaluating it way too soon in the process. What are the symptoms of premature evaluation you might want to know? Well, if you're a business and you're surveying your customers before you've even had one interaction with them, then you might be suffering from premature evaluation. If you're a salesperson and you're asking for the sale without even understanding the pain points of your customers, then you might be suffering from premature evaluation. If you're a college senior and you made your decision about what job to take after one interview, after one college job fair, then you too might be suffering from premature evaluation. Premature evaluation is like going on a first date. Before dinner's even served, your date says to you, now tell me, on a scale of 1 to 10, would you like 1 to 2 kids, 2 to 3, or 3 or more? You would go running for the hills. A telltale sign of premature evaluation is called surveyitis. Surveyitis is businesses' constant need to gather intel on its customers by over-surveying them. Here are a few examples. I do some online shopping. Okay, I do a fair amount of online shopping. And when I'm online shopping, what I don't like to happen is when I'm in my groove and up pops a survey. It's like, okay. The other day I was on a popular athletic firm's website, and I was looking at a top and I picked my color, I picked my size, I put it in my cart, and all of a sudden it was out of stock. It's like, okay. Well, this company thought this is a great time to find out if you'd recommend us to your friend or family member. I don't think so. No, I wouldn't, because not only did you not have my top, but to top it all off, you picked a really bad time to survey me. Boom organizations survey after every single interaction. This is an app to purchase groceries. So I purchase my groceries, go about my way, get my groceries, everything's good. Maybe a week later I need some more groceries. So I go onto my app again, and boom. How was your order from a week ago? How was the driver? Did they get you everything you needed? How were their substitutions? My driver from a week ago? I'm fairly confident that if my life depended on it, I could not pick that driver out of a police lineup. And not only that, if I didn't get my kids their Pop-Tarts, I would have been on that phone right away back to your company and tell you that. You have not seen somebody hit five, five, five, five stars as quickly as a working mom who's ordering groceries between business meetings. And this company is taking that metric as an indication of how well they're doing in business. Hey, guys, look, we got all fives again. We are on fire. The need for business to gather data as social proof for their shareholders happens all the time. The last time I checked, profit was a better form of social proof. Why don't we focus on that by keeping our customers happy to gain more profit? Corporations like millennials, like instant gratification, like a trigger finger on a dating app, big business is swiping left on their customers because they're not even giving the relationship a chance. And customers, in turn, are swiping left on big business and rejecting them because they're not getting their needs met. In our capture-hungry society, we believe that taking a picture of an experience encapsulates the whole experience. If we take a picture that we were at Yellowstone Park and post about it and our friends like it, that's all that matters, really. Big business is confusing taking a snapshot of a relationship with the entire relationship. It's hurting business profit, though, and this is what we have to realize. It takes five times more to get a new client or customer than it does to retain an old one. Five times. And you might be interested to know that customers usually spend 67% more after their third year of being your customer than in the first two. Why would you alienate them in the first two years of business when, with a little time and love, you might be able to turn a million-dollar book of business into at least a $1.67 million book of business? But the question remains, what is loyalty? How do we measure loyalty? This is the loyalty equation that I've come up with. Now you math majors, this is not a mathematically correct equation, so just want to let you know that. Authenticity, consistency, and value over time equals loyalty. Time is the key data element. With time, we can perfect our authenticity. With time, we become more consistent. And with time, we create better value for our customers. Here's an example of a company that does loyalty very well, Tesla. CEO Elon Musk is adamant that transparency is part of their company culture. And not just transparency when the news is good, but transparency when the news is bad as well. If you're a CEO of a car company, you do not want this to be your social proof and on the internet. Car self-combusting, never good. What Musk could have done is swept it under the rug, buried it in different business articles, but he didn't. He blogged it out to his entire Tesla community. The key word here is community. He was able to tell them what happened, what they're going to do to prevent it from happening in the future, and what they're going to do to compensate this poor fellow whose car just blew up. Loyalty is something that we have to focus on every day because loyalty is important to our customers. We have to remember, in a diverse and ever-changing market, well-managed relationships are still the best currency. It might sound cheesy, but it's true. This was a business meeting, and this is Holly. Holly and I go way back. During this business meeting, I should add that Holly's corporate headquarters is in Madison, Wisconsin. In Madison, Wisconsin, they are very proud of their dairy. After our business meeting, Holly went out and got me the cheese head, and I put it on. We laughed about it, and we took the picture. This is a great picture, and I love it because it shows the true value and loyalty of the relationship and, quite frankly, the fun of it all. We must remember that relationships are like compounded interest. The greater time that the relationship has, the more value it ends up having, 67 percent more value. Here's a great quote about Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett, the billionaire, earned 99 percent of his wealth after age 50 and 97 after age 65. It gives us a little hope, doesn't it? Warren Buffett is an excellent investor, but the world is full of excellent investors. Billionaire Warren Buffett's secret is he's been a great investor for over 80 years. What is your relationship investment strategy? I'll give you some things that you should think about to help develop your own relationship investment strategy. Ask how you can best support them, them meaning your clients, them meaning your customers, them being your family members, them being your partners or your friends. This is important. Listen to understand their pain. My mother would always say, two ears, one mouth, use them in that proportion. Respond to problems quickly. Show them appreciation in ways that benefit them. Everyone wants to see the benefit of the relationship. Provide consistent value like the loyalty equation. Admit your mistakes and make them right. Take Elon Musk in this one. Focus on responsive support. Include them in your success. And finally, create community. So as promised, today I shared with you my secrets for being successful in life and in business and I provided the blueprint to develop your own relationship investment strategy. My question is, now what? The thing they can't teach you in business school is to resist the urge for instant results and instead take that leap of faith that's necessary to believe in the value of relationships over time. The bottom line is, it takes a lot of energy to make relationships great. And emerging business leaders should think more about putting that energy into the front of the relationship, creating value, instead of the back where they have to take five times more effort to get a result. What if future business leaders stopped putting their energy into collecting data on their customers and instead reinvested that energy into making their customers happy? Wow, what a concept. The result would be winning customers for life instead of capturing them for the short term. And when your lifelong customers are happy, you'll be too busy counting your business profits to send them a survey. Thank you.