The Business Battlecard by Paul O’Dea

Author:Paul O’Dea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oak Tree Press

The road to understanding what customers value has to start with the customer. Yet feature-focused presentations, supported by ‘death by PowerPoint’ and delivered with the rat-a-tat-tat of an Uzi sub-machine gun persist. They just confuse and turn away potential customers.

Put yourself in the position of the senior executives. Set aside the feature machine gun. Realise that what’s uppermost in their minds is getting products to market faster, improving customer retention, beating competitors, reducing costs or growing revenue. In simple terms, they want to get jobs done.

The customer’s evaluation team may be interested in your cool product or in seeing how it works. But the heads of department will only give you their undivided attention if you are addressing their priority problems.

Help your team to understand customers’ needs. Get them on the value discovery trail. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Those working closest to the customer often provide the best insights. Don’t wait for customer queries or complaints to arrive. Become a trusted advisor.

Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

At one of our strategy workshops a participant, whose company provides chemical solutions for manufacturing, stated that her company’s aim was to ‘understand the customer more profoundly than they understand themselves’. She showed how they achieve this:

“Usually we have a first meeting with the production manager to discuss issues. However, to get to the nub of the issue, it is often necessary to talk to those at the coal-face. So, we ask for an introduction to the production line supervisors. We talk to them, and offer to come back at the end of the shift when they are less busy.

“This has a two-fold result – firstly, the production line supervisors are delighted that someone had acknowledged that mid-production is a busy period and is taking enough interest to come back when they have more time. Secondly, the production manager is generally not around at that stage, so we get to have more open conversations with the guys at the coal-face – giving us insight into latent problems and unarticulated pain.”

Find a way to communicate with as many of your customer’s buying influencers as possible. The key to understanding their pain is to ask good questions. Don’t make assumptions about the problem. Once you have identified an area of concern, get to the root of it. Who is impacted? What is the impact? How have they tried to resolve this issue? What worked, what didn’t? Do they have any idea what costs might be involved?

For many industries, there are published benchmarks. Study these and find out how your customer rates in relation to their peers. Get help from an industry veteran to understand the key metrics driving revenues and costs. Such experts often have a broad range of contacts, credibility with key customers, and can provide valuable insights. Hire people who have worked for customers trying to solve similar problems.

Create value

One of our clients, let’s call them Perseus, is a growing company specialising in the design of integrated circuit chips. Their

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