Insight on the key to sustainable customer relationships.

1. “INSIGHT”. The key to sustainable customer relationships.
By Peter Coeckelbergh
The need for customer centricity for business success in 2018 is generally accepted. However Ranjay
Gulaty professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business school stated in Harvard Business
Review of April 2010 (https://hbr.org/2010/01/creating-a-customercentric-bus) stated: “It will be
difficult to find a CEO who would tell you that his company is not yet customer centred” He
immediately adds that “this is exactly where mass delusion begins for most companies”.
Customer Centred organisations build their relationships from the vision and reality of their
customer. They develop deep insight in the customer, his organisation, his business, his value chain,
its strategies and position. This is possible through a high degree of empathy with the customer at
levels in your organisation. A Customer Centred sales organisation is an indispensable link in this
game.
IN a Customer Centred organisation the starting point is the “process of the customer” and the goal a
sustainable relationship with the customer. The relationship on itself and Customer Life Time Value
are the main goal.
Developing insight in the customers organisation is a core competence of any customer organisation.
From a sales point of view the question rises how sales can contribute to the development of this
kind of sustainable customer relationships.
Next model is inspired by the model of Acclivus Corporation (www.acclivus.com). It shows the
building blocks of a sustainable relationship that can be influenced by sales people.
The model speaks for itself. It can be universally be applied to the sales organization a but applies as
well to the sales man and the sales team. The degree to which the commercial team can turn
InformaYon
Insight
Value
Trust
Sustainable
RelaYonship

2. information to “insight” and “insights” to “customer value” will be essential to the development of
real trust. Trust is required to get information. Herewith the three essential building blocks of the
cycle are defined: information, insight and customer value.
Focussing on this cycle will automatically lead to more opportunities. Your customer who sees you as
a trusted party will inform you when he has an opportunity for or he will ask for your opinion to solve
problems independently whether he thinks you can provide the solution or not. Your insights on the
other hand will enable you to see issues, problems and identify opportunities yourself.
Many leaders in sales development, such as Neil Rackham (SPIN – selling) and Miller Heiman
(Strategic selling) point at the importance to develop one or more sponsors or champions in your
customer’s organisation. These people are people in the customers organisation that are prepared to
supply you with this information. It is a frequent question during my courses on Account
Management and Opportunity management how you develop these relationships within an account.
Applying the above cycle is automatically leading to the development of such relationships. Of course
this doesn’t happen overnight. Losing a potential sponsor or champion however can happen
overnight. The only thing you need to do is to lose the confidence.
Acclivus defines insight as “looking beyond the obvious”. Being able to get access to as much
information from the customer, especially in those areas where customers struggle to find solutions,
should therefore be a core competence of your commercials. They should develop interviewing-
strategies and methods that give them access to information that allows your organisation in depth
understanding of the goals, the problems and the implications of the customer as an organisation
and the people behind that influence purchase of your products and services at as much levels as
possible.
We developed our own interviewing strategy to support such a depth interview. We call it the GPIV®-
approach: Goals, Problems, Implications, Value. The basic idea is that you should understand the
goals of your customer both at organisational level as well as on a personal level. You only create
(more) value if you contribute to the achievement to their goal better than the alternatives the
customer has.
Once you identify a Goal you can identify which problems the customer perceives to achieve that
goal. Possibly you will identify other issues than your customer does. At such moment you provide
insight to your customer which is practically always perceived as valuable by your contact person.
Understanding the implications of a problem allows you to understand the importance to solve that
problem and gives you an idea where you can deliver most value.
You can read more about this in my white paper on the GPIV® on my site www.petercoeckelbergh.be
I am convinced that each commercial nowadays applies this model every single day. The key question
however is: Do they snorkel of do they Scuba-dive? The question is not whether you apply this but to
which degree you apply it? Do your commercials develop their relationships in such depth that can
make the difference.
A critical issue for many organisations is not to train the induvial commercial but how to assure that
all intermediaries of customer share the information they collect. Assuring that this happens is an
important role for Key Account Managers. Unfortunately it is often overlooked. Read more about this
in my white paper on Key Account Management.

3. All together it looks as if the above is all obvious. In reality is extremely complex and exactly this
complexity offers a lot of opportunities. The deeper one digs the more value one can identify for the
customer and the more competitive advantage one gets.
It is not only applicable on the relation between organisations. It is even more true for the
relationship between people that are involved in the buying process. Your commercial should
become part of the product or service and this way become valuable for as much as possible buying
influences.
The more people are involved directly or indirectly in the buying process the more complex this game
becomes. Your organisation needs to gain insight what is valuable for a many buying influences as
possible even of those your commercial staff never met. Very often these are the final decision
makers. In depth discussions with those people who are in favour of your organisation should help to
complete the picture. In my white paper on Major Account Management I develop a methodology
that helps to get an overview of what information you have and do not have about your customer.
You will notice that in this document I never speak about the selling process. We believe that role of
the sales person is to facilitate the customer in it’s buying process. In our white paper “How to use
the buying process to sell more” you will find why we do not focus too much on the buying process.
Peter Coeckelbergh
Peter.coeckelbergh@skynet.be
www.petercoeckelbergh.be
+32 498 11 00 80