Customer Centricity

Moving From Value Creation To Value Co-Creation

Customer Centricity
Published April 11, 2013 by David Brock

In the past 15-20 years, we have adopted the view that “value is in the eye of the beholder.” Sales people are now trying to understand what customers value, then present their solutions in the context of what they value. Marketing provides tools to help sales people do this, whether they are questioning guides, justification guides, or other tools.

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Is 57% Your Buyer’s Number?

Customer Centricity
Published March 13, 2013 by Sales Benchmark Index

Mapping the buying process is a popular sales topic. But what does it mean and why is it important to sales leaders? We will explore in the post.

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The Sales Process Is Critical To Customer Experience

Customer Centricity
Published February 27, 2013 by David Brock

Recently I was at one of those giant events, you know, where sales leaders come together to talk about the challenges they face in growing their business. At dinner one evening, I was talking to a three executives, comparing notes on a new tool each was considering buying and implementing in their organizations. The conversation was fascinating, each had a completely different understanding of the tool and what it could do. Each also had very different opinions about the company that had developed and offered the tool. The conversation was almost surreal, it was as if they were talking about three completely different products from different companies.

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Slow Down the Customer to Win the Deal

Customer Centricity
Published February 21, 2013 by Sales Benchmark Index

This is a post for any Sales Leader considering or using a buyer-driven sales process. During many of our training events for a sales process rollout, we’ll get the question “So I should just identify the buyer’s stage and go from there?” The answer is No.

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An Output Of The Sales Process Should Be Profitable Customers

Customer Centricity
Published February 19, 2013 by David Brock

Most of the time we look at our sales process and think of it as producing deals, orders, or revenue. Don’t get me wrong, those are still critical outputs of the sales process. However, too often we fail to think about the quality of the deals we close. In our competitiveness or hunger to close business, we sometimes win the wrong deals.

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Is your target market small enough?

Customer Centricity
Published January 31, 2013 by Bob Apollo

It’s not a question that comes naturally to many CEOs or, let’s be honest, to most investors. Here’s the problem: for growth phase companies, all other things being equal, the probability of your success is inversely proportional to the size of the market you have chosen to target. At any given point in time, as far as sales and marketing effectiveness is concerned, small target markets are better than large ones.

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Are You Building Coalitions With Your Customers?

Customer Centricity
Published January 29, 2013 by David Brock

As sales professionals, we’re supposed to be great at building relationships with our customers. Relationships are important, they are the foundation to doing business. I don’t mean relationships in the “old sense,” but relationships earned through establishing trust and credibility with your customers, and the customer’s respect for the value created in the relationship.

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Banning BANT: it’s not how big the budget is, but how big the issue is

Customer Centricity
Published January 22, 2013 by Bob Apollo

Regular readers will know that I’m no great fan of the traditional BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) approach to sales qualification. It might work for simple transactional sales in which the prospect has an already recognised need they are trying to work out how best to satisfy, but in the complex-sales world most of the readers of this blog work in, BANT is at best a naive approach to opportunity qualification.

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Falling In Love With Our Products!

Customer Centricity
Published January 17, 2013 by David Brock

One of the nice things about sales people is we have tremendous passion about whatever it is we sell. We believe in our products, we cannot imagine anyone not being as enthusiastic as we are–or selecting an alternative solution. It’s impossible to imagine a sales person being successful without being excited about what we sell.

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Reading The Buyers’ Minds

Customer Centricity
Published November 27, 2012 by David Brock

As sales people, we always are trying to get into our Buyers’ minds. We want to understand what they are thinking, what drives them, how we can position ourselves and our solutions most favorably. We constantly search for some insight about how to connect more effectively.

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Knowledge is Power: 5 Reasons You Have to Know More to Grow More

Customer Centricity
Published November 15, 2012 by InsideView

The reasons for knowing customers well in a B2B sales sense should be self-explanatory, but sometimes these reasons become lost among numerous other sales concerns. However, neglecting efforts to get to know customers better can hamper all other marketing strategies. There are five key reasons businesses need to be more intelligible about their customers.

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Dig Deeper for Customer Insight to Win Deals

Customer Centricity
Published November 8, 2012 by Hank Barnes

Today’s sellers are deluged with ideas to help them be more successful. Whether it is social selling, big data, Challenger selling, or some other topic, everyone seems to have an answer for how to win more deals faster. And here is mine….focus deeply on your customers.

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When Did You Last Map the Buying Process of Your Customers?

Customer Centricity
Published October 25, 2012 by Sales Benchmark Index

Recent surveys, such as the one conducted by Corporate Executive Board in 2011, show that more than 50-60% of the buying process is being conducted without the help of a sales representative. It’s a fact that buyers have radically changed their buying behavior. If the map of your customer’s buying processes is not updated annually, you can find yourself behind the curve on this evolution.

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Perhaps There’s No Such Thing as Solution Selling – Only Solution Buying

Customer Centricity
Published October 16, 2012 by Bob Apollo

There’s a multi-million $ industry built up around solution selling. But maybe – just maybe – there’s a huge flaw in all of this. Because surely the only one who actually has the right to call anything a solution is the prospect who had the problem in the first place, and who has seen it resolved to their satisfaction. Not the vendor, not the sales person, just the customer.

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Sales Intelligence Rises

Customer Centricity
Published September 27, 2012 by InsideView

The B2B sales industry is not so different from Batman. The sales industry is a late-comer to innovation: technology just can’t replace those human instincts of building authentic relationships or understanding a customer’s need. However, buyer behavior has changed. By the time you reach your customers, they probably already know more about you than you know about them.

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4 Distinctively Different States of the B2B Buying Decision Process

Customer Centricity
Published September 25, 2012 by Bob Apollo

I’ve written before about the Buyer’s Journey, and about the stages that your b2b prospects go through in their buying decision process. That journey is rarely linear: your prospects can decide to move forward in their decision making process, stay where they are, go backwards or abandon the journey. Understanding where your prospects are in the journey and determining what tactics you should use at each stage are fundamental to the success of any B2B sale.

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The Bar is Being Raised for Both Buyer and Seller

Customer Centricity
Published September 18, 2012 by David Brock

The rise of the self educated customer doesn’t mean the sales person is unnecessary until later in the sales process. The correct part of the discussion is that customers no longer need sales people to do the same old things. Sales people are needed less to inform and educate the customer about the product–they can get much of that through the web.

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The Results of Listening to (or Ignoring) Your Customers

Customer Centricity
Published September 6, 2012 by Anneke Seley

There continues to be growing evidence proving that successful Sales 2.0 strategy and implementation increases sales effectiveness and efficiency. In those stories, there are recurring themes worth emphasizing. One of the simplest but most important ones has to do with paying attention to the people who buy your products and services.

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Sales 2.0 Thinking: Get an Outside Perspective

Customer Centricity
Published August 28, 2012 by Anneke Seley

We are all insanely busy these days. In our day-to-day jobs, we are so focused on execution that it’s difficult to think about how to improve performance and productivity. Here’s an idea: talk to people outside your company, compare experiences and share ideas.

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Who is Responsible for Mapping the Buying Process? A Sales Consulting Firm’s POV

Customer Centricity
Published August 22, 2012 by Sales Benchmark Index

Our sales consulting firm has helped dozens of companies map the buying process for their product or service. Over time, we have developed a process to do this correctly. Sales should not be burdened with the task of mapping the buying process for their product or service. Product Management should deliver to sales a buying process map for the product or service.

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The Age of the Buyer – How do you prepare?

Customer Centricity
Published August 16, 2012 by InsideView

Now is the dawn of a completely different era I like to refer to as The Age of the Buyer. Due to the emergence of social media as a means of communication and establishing relationships, consumers have been given the power to provide real-time feedback about products and services to an extensive audience.

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14 Business-Killing Things I Learned About Selling to Tech Buyers

Customer Centricity
Published August 14, 2012 by Anneke Seley

Note: This blog post is from one of our featured guest bloggers, Anneke Seley.  The post can also be found on Anneke’s blog (The Sales 2.0 Advocate) here.  It has been [...]

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Putting A “Face” To Our Customers

Customer Centricity
Published August 9, 2012 by David Brock

As sales people, we work with customers every day. We see them, we’re in their offices, we talk to them. They’re very real (sometimes too real) to us. Customers–each of them—are very important to us. Sometimes, it’s frustrating, people in our companies don’t seem to be as customer focused as we are.

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B2B Buying Cycle Alignment: 4 in 5 sales organisations must do better

Customer Centricity
Published July 26, 2012 by Bob Apollo

If you want a simple justification for why it’s worth insisting that your sales people provide evidence of their prospect’s buying behaviour, consider this: the sales organisations that did so won nearly 40% more of their forecasted deals than the organisations that paid no attention to it – and had far fewer losses and “no decisions”.

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The Role of B2B Sales in the Customer Decision Journey

Customer Centricity
Published July 19, 2012 by Hank Barnes

With all of the talk about customer power, much of the discussion has centered around B2C environments. At the same time, studies have shown that the quality of customer experience is as important for B2B. To help sales deliver positive customer experiences, it is worth taking a look at the key elements of customer journeys and then mapping into these the role of the B2B sales team.

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Sales Executive Council’s Challenger Research Provides Further Validation that CEM is Critical for B2B Sales

Customer Centricity
Published July 11, 2012 by Hank Barnes

We’ve cited the Sales Executive Council (SEC) a few times already in this blog.  That is because their research around sales performance during the downturn (and beyond, as it turns [...]

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Social Selling: What the Management Team Needs to Know to Succeed with Today’s Customers

Customer Centricity
Published July 5, 2012 by Anneke Seley

Like it or not, Social Media has changed both the buying and selling process. If your company is considering – or is in the process of – transforming into a social business (and it should be,) share this webinar with your managers or the task force driving change in your organization.

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The New Buying Cycle’s Impact on Sales

Customer Centricity
Published July 3, 2012 by Hank Barnes

In a recent Webcast, Dave Brock talked about the new buying cycle and how sales needs to change as a result of it. We conducted a followup discussion to dive deeper and discovered that some sales fundamentals have not changed at all.

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Webinar Offer

How does Sales 2.0 help your customers?

Customer Centricity
Published June 27, 2012 by Anneke Seley

Sales 2.0 has struck a chord with today’s sales and marketing professionals. More and more companies are looking for ways to improve the way they market and sell to today’s customers. But if Sales 2.0 is “a more effective and efficient way of selling for both the buyer and the seller, enabled through technology”, what is the impact of Sales 2.0 on our customers’ businesses?

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Webinar Offer

Customer And Market Transitions Wait For No One

Customer Centricity
Published June 13, 2012 by David Brock

I was struck by this comment from John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, “ We got knocked on our tail last year. Market transitions wait for no one. The ability to recognize and move on these is critical. If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”

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Give Your Customers the Gift of Value – A Competitive Strategy

Customer Centricity
Published June 6, 2012 by Sales Benchmark Index

One competitive strategy is to determine which activities within your sales team create real value for your customers? Can you eliminate activities to become more efficient without disrupting your revenue stream? Focus your resources on the activities that your customer is willing to pay for.

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Bonus Content

The Importance of Face-to-Face Meetings in a Sales 2.0 World

Customer Centricity
Published May 13, 2012 by Anneke Seley

I am one of the people who writes and speaks about the importance of phone and Web communications in today’s selling and buying processes. But I still believe there is nothing quite like a face-to-face meeting.

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Your Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know

Customer Centricity
Published May 2, 2012 by Hank Barnes

While we are firmly entrenched in the era of customer power, that does not mean that customer’s don’t need help and guidance. Even though information is everywhere, customers need your help guiding them toward the best solutions for your business. This is a big opportunity in 21st Century Selling.

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