Competing for Customers: Why Delivering Business Outcomes is Critical in the Customer First Revolution by Jeb Dasteel & Amir Hartman & Craig LeGrande

Author:Jeb Dasteel & Amir Hartman & Craig LeGrande
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2016-01-28T14:00:00+00:00

Culture Shift

To achieve its goal of outcome-oriented engagements, Cisco launched a major investment in fundamentally changing its sales organization. Every aspect from employee roles and responsibilities to compensation would be reevaluated. Hogan hired people from outside Cisco to bring a fresh perspective to the selling process. “We drove a huge transformation and took a very strategic approach to building our team,” Hogan says.

Of course, you might expect that switching from a focus on selling products to delivering “outcomes” while maintaining quotas would come as a culture shock to its sales reps. Cisco is asking everyone to play an active role and adopt a new mind-set. “We have to continuously push the system,” Hogan says. “We needed to make it a little uncomfortable. Business as usual is no longer good enough.” For Cisco, it’s really not about doing it one way or the other. It’s about doing both—quotas are fine and selling the components is fine, but you also have to provide the context. Meaning Cisco people have to tell the whole story from beginning to end and then deliver to customers and ensure outcomes within that context.

Cisco’s new “go to market” model fully embraces the customer’s point of view, asking in effect, “how do we change our organization to align to their business imperatives?” Compensation structures are being fine-tuned so that they’re “not so tactically focused,” and the company is adding longer-term customer success goals into compensation plans aimed at getting sales teams to adopt outcomes-oriented behaviors. Hogan describes the new structure as “more empowerment and less control,” whereby corporate management becomes the coach and the account manager is the quarterback and the overall strategist, the result of which is a reduction in bottlenecks and enhanced collaboration with the customer on the business outcome that has been targeted. All this enables much closer customer alignment.

Cisco’s fresh focus on business outcomes is still a work in progress, but the company has taken concrete steps toward making it a reality. For example, BTX is testing a concept called the “Business Value Framework” designed to help Cisco’s sales teams define “everything the customer is trying to solve for”—such as enabling a new business capability—and then aligning everybody in a coordinated effort to design and deliver the overall solution.

Account managers are encouraged to mobilize all of Cisco’s assets (e.g., industry experts, technical architects, executive leadership, business consultants) and to “share goals” across this larger team. This new collaborative approach allows for greater focus on the customer and less emphasis on particular products. To encourage adoption, BTX has created and rolled out what it calls a “Business Outcome Approach,” which drives consistency across teams, sets rules for engaging resources, and establishes milestones that will show progress toward meeting the customer’s desired business results.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.