There is a surprising lack of literature on company politics. For such an important topic that can be awkward for people, it seems there should be books, podcasts, training, and everything else on it. Today I am going to do my part on being some of the change I want to see in the world. I am sharing the five rules for dealing with company politics that I learned over my career.

Let’s imagine that you’re an account manager with 200 customers. If you know that 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of those customers, what do you think happens to the other 80 percent that only accounts for 20 percent of the revenue? Yep, you guessed right, not much. However, the reason not much happens with these accounts could be influenced by the biological amount of bandwidth you have for maintaining relationships.

Businesses often underestimate the importance of the areas of sound and smell in their Customer Experience. However, these two areas are crucial to get right—or you risk ending your Customer Experience on a sour note.

This underexploited area is why I was so keen to get Simon Faure-Field, CEO of Equal Strategy, an experience design consultancy, on a recent podcast. Faure-Field is an expert in sound and smell as part of the Customer Experience. Equal Strategy helps organizations use their Customer Experiences’ sounds and smells strategically. He shared with us why many Customer Experience design projects overlook sound and smell.

Customer emotions are essential in Customer Experience. Being deliberate about which emotions your experience evokes is critical, too. Today, we will take a deeper dive into making your customers feel “Cared for” with the 5 Rules for Making Customers Feeling Cared For and Valued.

Before we get into the rules, it’s essential to know what you’re aiming at and why.

We started a recent podcast by explaining that 50 percent of an experience outcome is about how a customer feels. However, most customers find it difficult to articulate that. Typically, they say they want a lower price or more features or whatever it might be. They don’t say, “I want you to make me feel valued.” Nonetheless, we know through all the research that we’ve done over the years is that those things drive value.

Welcome to Why Customers Buy, my weekly LinkedIn Newsletter series that explores how customers make decisions. It reveals ways to unlock what customers really want with new concepts and practical tips that drive value. Subscribe today right here.

Consider this. You and some friends decided to go to see a movie. As you enter you are asked to prove you have had the vaccine, only people who have had the vaccine can enter. It hasn’t been your turn yet to get the vaccine so you can’t see the movie, but 3 friends in your party have had the vaccine, they can go in. Is that OK?

In 1998, Joe Pine (@joepine), co-founder of Strategic Horizons, LLP, wrote a book along with Jim Gilmore called The Experience Economy. When I read this book, I thought, “Bloody hell! This is it!” I was working at British Telecom at the time, so I showed it to my boss. He had a similar reaction and set me on the route of improving the Customer Experience, and the rest is history.

Now, 23 years later, I run Beyond Philosophy. This global Customer Experience consultancy was named as one of the best management consultancies by Financial Times for the third year in a row this year. You could say that Pine changed my life.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I hosted him on a recent podcast. Pine and I discussed what we can expect now for live events that the vaccine is rolling out, and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel for the COVID-19 pandemic. Pine shared what he sees as a trend moving forward: The Hybrid Event.