How a Client-Centric Approach Drives Growth in B2B Orgs
Driving Growth with a Customer-Centric Framework
5 Ways Your B2B Organization Can Serve Your Clients Better
Lots of companies today will tell you they put the customer first. Then it’s back to selling as usual. It can’t be business as usual, though. Without a well-thought-out strategy and framework for utilizing a customer-centric mentality in the sales process, companies are losing out on tremendous growth opportunities.
5 Tactics for a More Customer-Centric Organization
Move Away from Product and Toward Value
Putting the customer first means thinking about what’s going to genuinely help them. What will be valuable information for them? What educational input can you provide that will make them more informed?
What companies tend to do is start by saying they have this incredible solution or service. They start rattling off all its features, benefits, and advantages over the competition. They then hope the customer will make the connection that this product or service will address their challenges and needs and help them achieve their outcomes.
Instead of leading with your product, though, start from the perspective of your customer. Think about their challenges and needs, and then align your solutions to those.
In the last year, a lot has transformed. Companies have to move quicker and be faster to change than ever. For the client, there is more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). If you position yourself correctly through value, you can be the one to guide them through this.
"Instead of leading with your product, though, start from the perspective of your customer. Think about their challenges and needs, and then align your solutions to those."
Actively Leverage Resources for Your Customers
A large part of successfully implementing a customer-first mind-set is making additional resources available to your customers.
Say, for example, you offer a sales technology solution. You know the customer’s organization has challenges that will make the implementation and adoption of your solution difficult.
If you connect your customer to a consultant who can identify and address those issues, you’ve provided an incredibly valuable service to them. As a corollary, that client is now more likely to successfully adopt and to scale your solution.
Done strategically, companies often find this additional expense is worth it because it does three important things:
- It positions you favorably in the customer’s mind.
- It provides genuine value that helps you be viewed as a strategic partner. This has the potential to open up previously unconsidered revenue opportunities with that customer.
- It positions your customer for better success with your solution. This leads to increased customer satisfaction with your product or service, and it increases the likelihood your upselling or cross-selling efforts will be successful.
Actively enabling and supporting your customers is good for them and, ultimately, good for you.
"A large part of successfully implementing a customer-first mind-set is making additional resources available to your customers."
Work Backward from the Customer
The cornerstone of any customer-centric framework is the idea that you start with your customer and work backward from there. Think about their
- needs,
- challenges,
- potential outcomes,
- unconsidered needs,
- market or industry,
- and ideal customers.
Once you have that repository of knowledge, you can align your content, processes, and approach to what will bring them the most value.
Take the time to actually design and outline this process. For many sales reps, starting with value over product is a transformation of how to think about the sales process. By writing it down in detail, you solidify that process, assert the importance of this change within your organization, and help facilitate the mind-set shift.
After doing this exercise, you might even find the opportunity to create new capabilities in your organization where you can drive value.
Make Your Customer the Hero
Too many companies think of themselves as the solution that’s going to solve all their customers’ problems. The problem with this mind-set is that it puts you and your organization at the center of everything.
Who should be in the spotlight? Your customer.
For success with a customer-centric framework, it necessitates a shift in mind-set. Your sales process shouldn’t be seen as you providing a service to your customer. Rather, it’s a partnership—one wherein your client is the hero, and you’re the guide.
You’re still working closely with that customer but in a much more consultative, education-based role in order to help that client achieve outcomes.
Prioritize Onboarding and Everboarding
Any system you implement in your organization is only effective if two things happen:
- The employees actually know what that system is.
- The employees adopt it and follow it in their day-to-day duties.
What does that mean? The onboarding and everboarding of your sales reps is an essential piece of this puzzle.
After all, you can’t expect to effectively drive change and to successfully shift your focus from product to value if the sales reps aren’t adequately trained on how that transformation will work.
Within your training, make sure to address the available resources to facilitate this change. That includes new messaging and all the content created to support that messaging.
Learn More about the Benefits of a Customer-Centric Framework
Interested in learning even more about what a customer-centric framework looks like? How to implement one in your business? What kind of benefits you can expect from implementing this?
Then join us for our upcoming webinar, How a Customer-Centric Framework Can Drive Massive Growth for Your B2B Sales Org. It’ll be July 15 at 1:00 p.m. (eastern). We hope to see you there!