Exploring B2B Relationship Lifecycles with Senior Leaders

Customer Attuned co-founder and Customer Management consultant Peter Lavers led a lively discussion exploring B2B Relationship Lifecycles, during this, our second Senior Leaders Forum of 2025.

Held at the welcoming 100 Wardour Street, 11 leaders from across industries including healthcare, international trade membership, vision care, insurance and financial services met to share experiences and thoughts on this important customer management subject. We reflect on the conversation which was held under the Chatham House rules.

A group of leaders sit around a table to discuss B2B Relationship Lifecycles at 100 Wardour Street

Our thanks to the senior leaders that attended our discussion

Peter presented two illustrative business models to introduce the subject and kick-off the conversation. The first interweaves Edison’s Project Life Cycle model with Tuckman’s to demonstrate how the cycle of a business relationship evolves from forming through to either the deliberate reforming or the unintended decline or decoupling of the relationship. The second illustrates the behavioural science of customer relationship needs around a Customer Journey.


Compiled by Dr Mark Hollyoake, this model illustrates the B2B Relationship Lifecycle	A Customer Journey with integrated Account & Contact Management Model

The following considerations were expressed by the attendees.

Is the breakdown of a business relationship inevitable?

Relationship failure is not a certainty, but neither is survival. Circumstances (e.g., consolidation) and key people on either side can change. Businesses can be deliberate in their pursuit of a targeted outcome. With retention-based businesses, a failure to find value as a result of the relationship can make re-evaluation hard! Where organisations are full of data and metrics, the question can be posed: Relationally, what is being measured? Should there be a different, relational approach to measurement?

Organisations can often identify ‘Value’, but from whose perspective? Organisations can be tempted to focus on the value of the customer to their business rather than the value of their product, service, or behaviours to the customer. Should suppliers, therefore, spend time with their customer identifying and demonstrating the value they bring?

When renewal is upcoming and breakdowns have occurred, there is a valid question to ask about what factors participants are willing to change in order to keep the relationship going. Once trust breaks down, it can take a lot of effort to try and rebuild it. More foundationally, there is a need to understand where the fractions exist!

ABM, Account Based Marketing, is a valuable mechanism to grow relationship value and longevity. By knowing the customer deeply, teams can feed positive, relationship-affirming insights to proactively support the renewal process.

Customer Journeys should be developed and understood

A number of tactics were discussed and shared to holistically support the Customer Journey:

For renewal-based businesses, although the steps taken might be the same for new customers and those that are well-established customers, there can be benefits experienced when the journey recognises the different needs and behaviours based on relationship maturity.
Embedding the product or service into the customer’s business is important to relationship longevity – the process of onboarding is a critical success factor for ongoing loyalty.
Taking time to understand the customer’s desires from the product/service prior to purchase is important to the later stages; focusing on meeting the needs and expectations can protect long-term relationships.
Take the initiative in making constant contact with the customer throughout their engagement. Just purely being reactive at the point of renewal can create challenges and make the relationship transactional; does the customer know why they need to renew, have they identified the value received against the financial cost, are we even dealing with the right person to secure the renewal?
There is a tendency for CRM systems to focus on sales activities and not support the customer’s post-purchase experience; this misses the collection of valuable insight.
While NPS is used to receive feedback, where there are breakdowns in a relationship, there can be a need to understand a customer’s underlying experiences.
Building multi-layered and multi-departmental relationships is important – such engagement can develop trust and support the ongoing deepening of the relationship.
Think of renewal as a 12-month process; this challenges internal attitudes and behaviours for the good.
The capabilities required across the customer journey vary – a capability deficiency in a team delivering one key part of the journey can undermine the whole relationship. Recognising the skills and capabilities needed and then ensuring these are in place are a key organisational challenge. For example, does a business have the capabilities needed to both effectively ‘hunt’ for new business as well as to ‘farm’ existing relationships; and are these teams aligned in the relational values being both established and then maintained.

The Power of Moments of Truth

It is well understood that it is easier (and more cost-effective) to keep customers than acquire new ones; this makes the quality of interactions at every touch point important to any relationship’s success. The identification of specific Moments of Truth (MoTs) across the whole Relationship Lifecycle provides the opportunity to assess this quality at the points when they really matter. Awareness of high-risk fail points allows mitigating steps to be taken. MoTs can support the pivoting of organisational capabilities to ensure relevancy throughout the relationship with the intention of extending the lifetime. As a Moment of Truth, onboarding was identified as a critical point; failure to ensure that the customer is set on a course to have their initial expectations met can result in a poor relationship.

Do we ‘know’ our customers or just ‘know about’ them?

The typical approach when considering the depth of relationship with our customers is it’s not that we ‘know you’ but that we ‘know about you’. There are different levels of business relationships, and we need to be attentive to these differences. Data is a big thing, and we should fully use the information available. The difference between knowing about and actually knowing your customer significantly impacts retention, and the sharing of relevant information facilitates a deepening of the relationship across both sides. A key capability of those managing these relationships is the ability to maintain ‘curiosity’ over an extended period of the relationship and not assume they know everything there is to know.

All this highlights a number of challenges

The discussion created questions that will demand different responses for each organisation:

Whose responsibility is this?!
How can a multi-departmental organisation co-deliver quality interactions and assess that quality?
How can you ensure aligned relationship intentions across different and even siloed teams?
How do we ensure we have the capabilities needed across the business to manage the relationship throughout the relationship cycle?

Discussion Outcomes

Although two different entities, there are benefits for both customers and suppliers when the relationship management cycle meshes with the business lifecycle (maturity). When aligned in purpose and understanding of the customer journey, teams, systems, and processes can more effectively collaborate across departments.

This delivers quantifiable mutual value which helps the supplier achieve growth targets both from reaping the benefits of existing relationships, and from the acquisition of good new customers.

Customer Attuned hosts these leadership meals over the year. If you would like to be involved, please contact us.

We help businesses build mutually valuable relationships based on trust through developing effective customer strategies and by building up your teams to deliver on your customer promises. If you are facing challenges in your business relationships we’d like to have a chat, please get in touch.

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Paul Cranston

Associate Director at Customer Attuned

Paul helps organisations better understand their customers so that their marketing and customer management can be more effective. He has over 20 years’ experience in business communications, marketing and strategy enabling significant business growth primarily in the B2B sector.