Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.
This week on the podcast, we take a deep dive into one of the three competitive strategies for market leadership, as mentioned in the book The Discipline of Market Leaders: customer intimacy.
Chris, Jol, and Carol talk about the types of conversations you can have with your customers to enable you to learn their pain points, the opportunities that come from having an intimate relationship with your customers, and the importance of having an attitude of service.
We hope you enjoy this episode!
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Getting into the Lives of Your Customers
Working at a Fortune 500 company, I learned how they get into the lives of their customers. For the business to be successful, we had to do that.
Scale is important. How much do you know about your customer? How many touch points do you have? How well do you know the customer’s business? What are its pain points? Businesses thrive on knowing as much as possible about their customers.
Customer Intimacy for Small Organizations
The organizations that I’ve worked with have many, many customers. In retail, you can’t contact all of your customers.
But you should have touch points for the customers who buy your products on a regular basis. You can automate some of that contact. Regardless, touch points can give you an understanding of where your sales are coming from and how you can increase them. Where is your market share coming from? What industry is giving you most of your customers? Do you know that industry extremely well, or do you need to learn more about its pain points?
A Structure for Diagnostic Conversations with Your Customers
As the relationship between you and your customer develops, a broader range of issues are introduced into the conversation. In this way, your opportunities to serve that customer grow. And so do your sales opportunities.
But how can you cultivate such a relationship? Talk about the aspirations of the person and the aspirations of the person’s business so that you can gather information and better understand the situation. Help him or her to articulate goals and then think through strategies and tactics for reaching those goals. Clearly articulate what is going well and what is not going so well. Out of a conversation like that, issues pop. The issues may be strictly business ones or may be related to personal matters. When the issues have been identified, the opportunities will flow.
To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.
Mentions
Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.
The Discipline of Market Leaders (book) by Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema