To begin with, it's a business relationship - not a social relationship. "Ally" is not the same as "friend" or "buddy" - in fact, you can have a strong Ally Relationship with someone with whom you have little or no social contact. But just because it's a business relationship doesn't mean it's impersonal. Quite the contrary: Ally is a highly personal business relationship, in which the constant focus is on growth and success of the client's business.

Little known fact: there are only three possible business relationships that can exist between a service provider and a client. What's really exciting is: what relationship you have depends on one factor only - and that factor is entirely within your control! The most common relationship is Service Source . The second relationship, Solution Provider , is a step up, and is where the best of your competitors operate. Ally is the top level, the most valued and valuable business relationship. Very few service providers currently operate at this level. Building Ally Relationships builds and sustains business success. (Want to know more? Read Chapter 1 of Ally Relationships .)

Because your "crown jewel asset" - the inclination of your market to buy from you instead of your equally qualified competitors - is at great risk. And that risk is rapidly increasing.

It's long story (told in full in Chapter 1 of Ally Relationships) but in a nutshell: you offer excellent services, and make a real contribution to your clients, but so do your competitors. Your competitors are smart and hard-working; if you offer a service, chances are they offer the same service, at least in the eyes of your market. And all your packaging and slogans and advertising can't change that simple fact: to your market, you and your competitors are offering essentially the same services.

So why would they pick you? Because they know you and like you? Because you have done well for them in the past? These help - but not as much as you might like. Not enough to stake your business on. Your competitors also have a good track record, with many satisfied references who really like them. And they will do almost anything - including cutting prices - to build a track record with your clients.

The only known way to protect that "crown jewel asset" is to create business relationships that differentiate you from your competitors. Ally Relationships.

The same way you build any relationship - by what you say and what you do when you interact with a client.

Ally Relationships are built when you engage in a focused conversation with your client. It's an exchange between two equals, both of whom are vitally interested in the growth and success of the client's business, both of whom are actively digging into the most important strategic issue the client currently needs to understand better. It's different from the usual business interaction: it's not an interview, it's not a presentation, it's not a status review, and it's certainly not a sales pitch. In other words, it's not what almost every service provider does almost all the time when talking with a client. Therein lies the challenge - and the opportunity. To build Ally Relationships, you need to break some old habits and replace them with new ones.

But it's not hard , like changing your diet or learning to write with your weaker hand - relationship habits are easy habits to break because you already know how to do everything you need to do, in order to build Ally Relationships successfully. Where you probably need some guidance is in putting your knowledge and skills together in a way that leads to an Ally Relationship. There are keys to success and traps to avoid; there are even a set of specific operating principles to help keep you on track - and, sure, you need to practice a bit to groove the new habits in. But, as thousand of service providers have discovered for themselves: "This is doable." (The keys, traps and operating principles - along with everything else you need to know to begin developing your own ability to build Ally Relationships - can be found in the book, Ally Relationships.)

The same way you build any relationship - by what you say and what you do when you interact with a client.

Ally Relationships are built when you engage in a focused conversation with your client. It's an exchange between two equals, both of whom are vitally interested in the growth and success of the client's business, both of whom are actively digging into the most important strategic issue the client currently needs to understand better. It's different from the usual business interaction: it's not an interview, it's not a presentation, it's not a status review, and it's certainly not a sales pitch. In other words, it's not what almost every service provider does almost all the time when talking with a client. Therein lies the challenge - and the opportunity. To build Ally Relationships, you need to break some old habits and replace them with new ones.

By contrast: do you find yourself routinely and consistently in a conversation, an exchange between two equals, both of whom are vitally interested in the growth and success of the client's business, both of whom are actively digging into the most important strategic issue your client currently needs to understand better? When you walk out of the client's office, is it with the certain knowledge that you have increased their interest in talking with you again? That's how you know you have an Ally Relationship.

Probably - it depends on the product and who you are providing it to.

Key questions: Does your product provide a competitive advantage to your customer's business? Could it? Is there a significant service component in selecting, configuring, installing, running, updating or maintaining your product? Are you a multi-product business, with the potential for significant cross-selling of product lines? If you answer "yes" to any of these questions, building Ally Relationships with your customers could be a powerful strategic move to help differentiate you from your competitors.

Absolutely - and you should , if you want to maximize your contribution to your company.

Your job as an internal is the same as an external's: to contribute, through your knowledge and expertise, to the growth and success of the company. You must tightly align your efforts with the strategic intentions and concerns of the people who run the company - the key executives, who determine your priorities. To do this, you need to have conversations with those executives in which you try to see the business through their eyes - Ally conversations, in other words. But if you're like most internals, you get few if any opportunities to do that; instead, you are expected to determine your area's initiatives in response to the written goals and objectives, and to present your programs for budget approval. It's done that way simply because executives have not experienced a more productive way of doing it. Typically it only takes one well-executed Ally conversation with an executive to change over to an Ally Relationship - and to get you into the strategic conversation in your company.

It's not hard. It does take practice, performance feedback, and a bit of judiciously applied coaching.

First, read the book Ally Relationships , and practice what you learn. This will be enough to get you started - a bit like playing golf and not embarrassing yourself on the course. If you need to improve your ability to perform at a higher level - like playing in the club golf tournament - you may want to get some specific coaching. There are coaching workshops available for that. And if your job requires you to build Ally Relationships with C-Suite executives - the equivalent of PGA level skills - you might want coaching from a master Ally Relationships coach .

First, you yourself need to be convinced, through experience, that Ally Relationships are crucial to your company's sustained success.

Perhaps you are one of those rare (3%-5% is a rough estimate) individuals who already approach business this way. You know it works because it's what you do; when you read the book Ally Relationships , your response is similar to one bank CEO, who wrote: "This finally puts words around what I have been doing all my career, and not being able to explain to my people." But if you're among the 95%+ of successful service providers who recognize that Ally Relationships is not their current standard way of doing business (it helps to be honest with yourself here; nobody is giving grades or handing out awards), then you need to be first in line to develop your own ability to build Ally Relationships.

Typically, a pilot coaching workshop with you and 3-5 of your top people is the best way to start. You will then have first-hand knowledge to decide how to proceed from there: who in your organization needs to understand Ally Relationships (they should at least read the book), who needs to be able to build Ally Relationships reliably (they need a coaching workshop experience), who needs top-level skill (significant coaching by a master is called for here)? And depending on how large or complex your organization is, you may need some consulting help to align your systems (goal setting, performance assessment, reward) with an Ally approach to the market.

Specificity, depth and precision.

The Ally Relationship is very specific: you know precisely what to do to build one, and you have exact criteria for success. The approach is built on a deep understanding of how relationships develop and change, which is rooted in Descriptive Psychology (a little-known but powerful academic discipline for understanding people, their actions and relationships.) Most important, it is both understandable and "doable" - unlike many approaches, it does not require you to build your hypothetical "RQ" or master reading body language or assessing your client's preferred perception mode. The Ally Relationship approach recognizes that functioning adults are already relationship supercomputers. It builds on what you already know and know how to do - and as it turns out, that's more than enough.

Not at all, but it's easy to see how one might confuse the two. They have a lot in common - with one crucial difference.

The term trusted advisor originated in the professional services world more than 25 years ago. Like Ally, it was an attempt to articulate the highest and most valued level of business relationship. Over the years, thousands of accountants and lawyers and financial advisors have tried to build their business by becoming trusted advisors - with disappointingly limited success. (In fact, the original impetus for articulating the Ally Relationship approach was a large accounting firm saying "We can't figure out how to actually implement our trusted advisor program.")

The problem is, trusted advisor describes the end state of a long relationship-building process, which gives you very little help on how the process works in the beginning and middle. How exactly do you build trust from scratch? What are you before you earn that hard-earned standing of advisor? It's a bit like the old joke about the owl who advises a cricket to become a grasshopper; when asked how to do that, the owl replied: "I've given you the strategy. The implementation is up to you."

Ally is not a relationship you eventually earn; it's what you are from the beginning. When you have established an Ally Relationship, and it strengthens over time, you may wind up as a trusted advisor. But you're an Ally all along.