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Agile Customer Intelligence now underpins Sales
Understanding your customer is the essential building block for sales. Without this understanding needs are overlooked and product market fit is hard to achieve. The stakes are even higher when pursuing enterprise customers (corporate and government) since many other factors come in to play beyond whether your offering can meet their need,
Some examples of factors that complicate and extend enterprise sales include
- existing business and personal relationships with other suppliers
- prior commitments to related parties, vendor architectures, business models and technologies
- restructures and personnel changes
- sudden changes in demand from the customer's customers
- corporate activity e.g. M&A, divestitures, capital raises
Any of these things can make or break a sale regardless of how good your offering is and well it meets the target customers need.
Meeting the base needs is now table stakes. Enterprise customers now demand that vendors create value and further proactively bring innovative offerings (replete with multiple partners if so needed) that can tap into previously unidentified value in order to win the sale.
Given the complexity involved, many organisations today use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to manage customer interactions. Whether a simple spreadsheet or a full service online CRM platform is used, most organisations tack contacts and progress using a sales pipeline that are fed from updates by sales representatives and account managers. Unfortunately this approach is highly dependent on the sales reps and account managers first seeing what's going on and then updating the CRM.
As a result many CRM deployments fail to enable better sales from
- the lack of timely relevant input of key information
- an inability to adequately assess the impact of that information
- the lack of mechanisms to adequately share key changes in a timely fashion that allows the rapid development of alternative scenarios to win
We believe that rate of change will continue to accelerate and that customer intelligence now needs to be agile
- market changes need to be tracked and have their impact assessed automatically wherever possible
- CRMs that create an online sales pipeline are no longer sufficient, the customer platform now needs to allow the rapid formulation, validation and sharing of scenarios to create wholistic value.
"Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before the realize they need it."
Steve Jobs
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A call for agile customer insight to be integrated with delivery
The digitization of the enterprise means that new offerings and services can be created and delivered faster than ever before using part solutions that blend internal and external capabilities. Enterprises can and are increasingly adopting 'best-of-breed' with 'mix-n-match' sourcing to get what they want when they want it from whomever can provide it. To effectively engage with and deliver value to enterprise organizations must now map the ecosystem around the enterprise to understand what they are doing with the suppliers, customer and competitors in real time. Vendors win customers today by bringing both insight and the ability to translate it into concrete action for the customer. Those who don't bring both insight and the ability to make it real will increasingly be branded as 'old-school', slow and irrelevant.
Augmented Research Platform
Maintaining an awareness of customer needs so you can continuously bring new value can be time-consuming and tedious. See how the Incyzr Augmented Research Platform helps automate the tracking of what's happening inside and around your target customers so you can always create the 'A-HA!' insight moments that generate sales.
Strategy + Execution Consulting
To consistently deliver value to customers as their needs and situation changes means that strategies must be refined when executed. See how we combine strategy with execution to create and deliver strategies with your team that manage the continuous creation of value for customers
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