Your multi-year contract is up for renewal, and you believe your competitors would love to be your position.
Your team is convinced the customer loves them and your solution in gate reviews long before the recompete RFP dropped.
Your PWin (probability of win) was sky high as you excitedly called into your meeting.
The award is announced…and it’s not you. A range of emotions hit you as the call wraps up.
What went wrong?
Losing any contract can be incredibly frustrating, especially if you were convinced you would win. And unfortunately, it can have devastating consequences.
When this happens, leaders immediately wonder:
“How could my team let a competitor steal it right from under our noses? How could they not know what the customer wanted, when they were right in the trenches with them?”
The answer is simple: your team overestimated their relationships.
This is a common story we hear from leaders often, as teams frequently lead their leadership to believe they simply have wonderful relationships with customers and stakeholders.
Reality rarely matches this self-assessment, and if you’re not tracking any KPI associated with relationship quality, there is no way for you to validate their claims.
Worse, now it’s on you to plug the $50M hole in your forecast.
You live for predictable, organic growth—but too often, you’re blindsided by losses like this you never saw coming.
The missing piece?
Usually, your team’s disconnect is driven by 2 factors: culture and lack of skills.
When your team is more focused on your internal processes than the customer’s needs and drivers, large disconnects can take place opening up new opportunities for your competitors.
Even if you maintain a (truly) customer-centric culture, if your team doesn’t have the skills, knowledge and confidence to ask the right questions, you’ll get nowhere fast.
Knowing where you really stand with customers is essential to move past assumptions and discover the real discriminators to compete and win.
Does your team miss the critical but subtle clues?
Customer Relationship Score (CRS) is the one KPI that can save your team from guessing and hand you the win. In this article, we’ll show you how.
Melissa is a sharp and determined CGO who called us last year for help. She shared her team just lost a must-win recompete they’d banked on and thought was a “sure thing.”
They were completely blindsided.
A few weeks later, she learned the winning team had dug deeper, catching shifts in needs and priorities Melissa’s onsite PM, SME, and even BD team missed.
They were operating on assumptions instead of deep customer intel and thought the customer must be pleased, as there have been no complaints.
But while they held back on the difficult questions, their competitors were hard at work gathering the customer’s real requirements and motives. This mistake cost Melissa millions.
She was concerned for her team’s future, and felt frustrated she lost despite following what she thought were best practices.
Melissa mentioned she was not looking forward to the late nights she would have to spend with the team to try to make up for this loss, and worse, she wasn’t sure how to prevent this in the future. How could she even attempt to get her team to focus on what really mattered?
Sound familiar?
That’s the sting of weak CRS—your team won’t see the disconnect until the debrief.
Teams often mistake casual chit-chat for good relationship quality. But being liked isn’t the same as being trusted; trust comes from connecting, understanding, and providing value.
Have you recently experienced any of the following?
- Proposals lack clear differentiators because your team didn’t understand the competition and customer’s needs well enough to know what set your solution apart.
- Surprise losses to competitors: everything appeared great until suddenly it didn’t.
- Unnoticed changes in acquisition strategies until it was too late.
All of these likely resulted in a loss for you or someone you know, so you understand the pain of removing millions in forecast revenue in cases like this.
Traditional KPIs like win rates or deal volume tell you what’s already happened—they’re lagging indicators, snapshots of the past.
CRS is a leading indicator, revealing in real-time whether your team’s engagement is laying the groundwork for future wins and on contract growth.
By measuring trust and strategic fit before the deal closes, CRS shows you if you’re on the right path or if your team is paving the way for the competition.
Top-performing companies don’t just track outcomes; they prioritize customer relationships and measure their strength to predict and shape them.
Firms that embed CRS into their approach see stronger partnerships and higher PWin, proving it’s not just a feel-good metric—it’s a growth driver.
CRS is a critical metric in your relationship management strategy. Remember: you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
At its core, the Customer Relationship Score (CRS) reflects the strength of the partnership: how much customers see your team as a vital ally focused on their success, and not just another vendor.
❌ It doesn’t measure how often your team shares in casual conversations.
✅ It’s a deeper, more strategic measure of how much the customer values your partnership.
High CRS means your employees—especially those with direct customer access, like business developers and delivery teams—aren’t guessing about needs or improvising solutions.
Instead, they’re armed with real insight into what customers value, boosting win probability (PWin) and turning relationships into a competitive edge. It’s about alignment, not just chit-chat.
Customer Relationship Score (CRS)
A measure of trust, emotional connection, and strategic alignment between employees and customers, assessed by those with customer access, like business developers or delivery teams, to boost win probability (PWin), drive organic growth and guide deeper relationships.
Unlike traditional metrics that focus on transactional satisfaction, CRS provides a deeper view of relationship quality and practical steps to take to improve factors driving loyalty, retention, and long-term growth.
Traditional KPIs (like win rates) are lagging indicators. CRS is different.
It’s a customer engagement metric, serving as a leading indicator that tells you whether you’re doing the right things to impact future wins. This is why the best-performing companies focus on CRS as a leading indicator driving CRM strategies—and it works.
When a high Customer Relationship Score (CRS) exists, there is no need for assumptions as you are aligned with the customer.
Your team will more easily:
- Uncover customer needs and priorities long before the RFP drops.
- Identify all the stakeholders, not just the obvious ones.
- Continuously refine and vet solutions based on customer input.
- Build trust that leads to repeat wins and strategic expansions.
Before tracking CRS, Melissa did not truly know where her team stood with their customers. She partnered with Hi-Q Group to address this and integrated CRS into the processes and culture.
Here’s the framework we used (and you can too):
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- Define CRS: Establish clear criteria for defining your own CRS or contact us to learn more. For example, a great relationship is one where your team understands the customer’s top strategic objectives, funding constraints, emerging needs, and stakeholder priorities. In a negative relationship, your team is limited to surface-level discussions, lacks stakeholder engagement, or misunderstands evolving needs.
- Determine Risks & Opportunities: Evaluate existing critical customer relationships using your CRS criteria. Have customer-facing employees (e.g., business developers, SMEs, PMs, sales) score current trust, emotional connection, and alignment levels per account to identify gaps where your team needs to focus their efforts. Our clients leverage the Hi-Q CRS Assessment to accurately report their current standings.
Businesses need to constantly evaluate how they do business with people. [This training] will create a team enabled to build deep embedded partnerships that provide the business long term, sustainable and desirable results across the organization.
- Train Your Team: Give all customer-facing team members the skills to engage customers, develop relationships, gather intelligence, and share it internally. These critical skills give your team the tools and confidence they need to shift their conversations and results.
- Integrate CRS into Processes: Embed CRS into account reviews, pipeline meetings, gate decisions, and capture strategies. When pursuing an account or opportunity, use CRS results to identify gaps and assign those with the best CRS to help.
- Align CRS with Growth Goals: To ensure CRS drives organizational success, link it directly to growth targets. Set clear goals—such as raising average CRS scores from 3.5 to 4.2 in 6 months—and track how high-CRS accounts correlate with measurable wins, integrating it into regular strategy reviews.
- Foster a Customer-Centric Culture: Many companies claim to focus on the customer, but despite what the posters in the break room champion, most organizations focus more on process than understanding the customer.
Building a truly customer-centric culture takes time, but by leveraging a measurement like CRS, you can take steps to prioritize customer understanding in your organization.Celebrate teams who excel at trust and alignment, like sharing stories of a recent success.
Recognize high CRS scores in performance reviews and train managers to coach these skills, embedding a mindset where strong connections are seen as the key to winning business.
High CRS ensures you never have to guess where you stand with a customer.
Instead of waiting for disappointing debriefs, you’ll have the tools to continually assess your relationship and intelligence quality.
This is how you outmaneuver competitors and ensure sustainable organic growth.
As a defense industry contractor and business owner with over 20 years of experience, I can confidently say that this is the most impactful training I’ve ever attended for building and improving customer relationships.
