“INSIGHT”. The key to sustainable customer relationships. By Peter Coeckelbergh The need for customer centricity for business success in 2018 is generally accepted. However Ranjay Gulaty professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business school stated in Harvard Business Review of April 2010 (https://hbr.org/2010/01/creating-a-customercentric-bus) stated: “It will be difficult to find a CEO who would tell you that his company is not yet customer centred” He immediately adds that “this is exactly where mass delusion begins for most companies”. Customer Centred organisations build their relationships from the vision and reality of their customer. They develop deep insight in the customer, his organisation, his business, his value chain, its strategies and position. This is possible through a high degree of empathy with the customer at levels in your organisation. A Customer Centred sales organisation is an indispensable link in this game. IN a Customer Centred organisation the starting point is the “process of the customer” and the goal a sustainable relationship with the customer. The relationship on itself and Customer Life Time Value are the main goal. Developing insight in the customers organisation is a core competence of any customer organisation. From a sales point of view the question rises how sales can contribute to the development of this kind of sustainable customer relationships. Next model is inspired by the model of Acclivus Corporation (www.acclivus.com). It shows the building blocks of a sustainable relationship that can be influenced by sales people.
InformaYon
Sustainable RelaYonship
Trust
Insight
Value
The model speaks for itself. It can be universally be applied to the sales organization a but applies as well to the sales man and the sales team. The degree to which the commercial team can turn
information to “insight” and “insights” to “customer value” will be essential to the development of real trust. Trust is required to get information. Herewith the three essential building blocks of the cycle are defined: information, insight and customer value. Focussing on this cycle will automatically lead to more opportunities. Your customer who sees you as a trusted party will inform you when he has an opportunity for or he will ask for your opinion to solve problems independently whether he thinks you can provide the solution or not. Your insights on the other hand will enable you to see issues, problems and identify opportunities yourself. Many leaders in sales development, such as Neil Rackham (SPIN – selling) and Miller Heiman (Strategic selling) point at the importance to develop one or more sponsors or champions in your customer’s organisation. These people are people in the customers organisation that are prepared to supply you with this information. It is a frequent question during my courses on Account Management and Opportunity management how you develop these relationships within an account. Applying the above cycle is automatically leading to the development of such relationships. Of course this doesn’t happen overnight. Losing a potential sponsor or champion however can happen overnight. The only thing you need to do is to lose the confidence. Acclivus defines insight as “looking beyond the obvious”. Being able to get access to as much information from the customer, especially in those areas where customers struggle to find solutions, should therefore be a core competence of your commercials. They should develop interviewingstrategies and methods that give them access to information that allows your organisation in depth understanding of the goals, the problems and the implications of the customer as an organisation and the people behind that influence purchase of your products and services at as much levels as possible. We developed our own interviewing strategy to support such a depth interview. We call it the GPIV®approach: Goals, Problems, Implications, Value. The basic idea is that you should understand the goals of your customer both at organisational level as well as on a personal level. You only create (more) value if you contribute to the achievement to their goal better than the alternatives the customer has. Once you identify a Goal you can identify which problems the customer perceives to achieve that goal. Possibly you will identify other issues than your customer does. At such moment you provide insight to your customer which is practically always perceived as valuable by your contact person. Understanding the implications of a problem allows you to understand the importance to solve that problem and gives you an idea where you can deliver most value. You can read more about this in my white paper on the GPIV® on my site www.petercoeckelbergh.be I am convinced that each commercial nowadays applies this model every single day. The key question however is: Do they snorkel of do they Scuba-dive? The question is not whether you apply this but to which degree you apply it? Do your commercials develop their relationships in such depth that can make the difference. A critical issue for many organisations is not to train the induvial commercial but how to assure that all intermediaries of customer share the information they collect. Assuring that this happens is an important role for Key Account Managers. Unfortunately it is often overlooked. Read more about this in my white paper on Key Account Management.
All together it looks as if the above is all obvious. In reality is extremely complex and exactly this complexity offers a lot of opportunities. The deeper one digs the more value one can identify for the customer and the more competitive advantage one gets. It is not only applicable on the relation between organisations. It is even more true for the relationship between people that are involved in the buying process. Your commercial should become part of the product or service and this way become valuable for as much as possible buying influences. The more people are involved directly or indirectly in the buying process the more complex this game becomes. Your organisation needs to gain insight what is valuable for a many buying influences as possible even of those your commercial staff never met. Very often these are the final decision makers. In depth discussions with those people who are in favour of your organisation should help to complete the picture. In my white paper on Major Account Management I develop a methodology that helps to get an overview of what information you have and do not have about your customer. You will notice that in this document I never speak about the selling process. We believe that role of the sales person is to facilitate the customer in it’s buying process. In our white paper “How to use the buying process to sell more� you will find why we do not focus too much on the buying process. Peter Coeckelbergh Peter.coeckelbergh@skynet.be www.petercoeckelbergh.be +32 498 11 00 80