written by D. Keith Pigues
Winning with your customers is not an isolated project or initiative. In order to truly win, you need an ongoing partnership with your customers – a consistent regimen that fosters healthy, profitable and long-term relationships.
Consider these top 10 questions when checking your company’s customer centricity vital signs:
- Do you know if your customers make more money by doing business with you?
- Do you talk with your customers on a regular basis to understand qualitatively and quantitatively what creates value for them?
- Do you use your customer’s perspective to inform your management team’s collective decision making for capital and operational plans?
- Do you develop consistent plans across the organization that demonstrate and communicate to customers your commitment and organizational alignment to respond to their input and ideas?
- Do you measure and track the implementation progress of customer plans and the resulting value you create for your customers (from the customer’s perspective)?
- Do you have a clear and quantitative value proposition that addresses the most valuable customer needs?
- Do you proactively enhance your value proposition to address changes in what your customers value and their new and emerging needs?
- Do you measure and track the direct financial contributions to your business from the investments you have made, based on the direct and unfiltered customer input?
- Can you accurately forecast or predict your company’s financial results from planned changes in your value proposition and the return on the associated investments?
- Do the key decision makers (and others) in your organization agree on the answers to the previous nine questions?
Your answers are critical to your company’s success.
Let’s talk about how your business can benefit from operating with an outside-in approach.
excerpt taken from Winning with Customers: A Playbook for B2B
