What’s the Conversation in Your Customer Strategy Room?

by Bill Caskey

On any given day, there are tens of thousands of sales organizations who sit around in their strategy rooms talking about how to target the next account, how to make a conquest list, how to “get the deal off of the street.”

But I often wonder what those conversations sound like in the customer’s strategy room.  It’s probably not, How do we get a deal? How do we get the Smith Group to do business with us? How do we get the value that the Smith Group has in our organization?  Their strategy rooms are probably filled with discussions about how to reduce cost, how to be better operationally, how to achieve and execute goals, etc.

So my question is, how are you inserting your conversation in their strategy room?  And the answer is, you probably aren’t. And you’re not because you don’t have solutions to the problem they’re talking about. It’s just you’ve never thought about your solutions in the context of what they’ve discussed in their strategy sessions.

Case in Point

We have a client in Arizona who is an electrical contractor.  They know that the conversations going on inside the General Contractor’s Office are:
•    How do we get the job done faster?
•    How do we reduce our cost?
•    How to improve safety of the jobs?
•    How do we satisfy our customer so that they hire us for more business?

So across town, my client needs to be having those exact conversations in their strategy session, and then figuring out a way to insert themselves in the customer’s room.  One way we recommended, and they’ve had success at, is writing a series of articles about what we know to be the general contractor’s biggest problems on the job.  In this case it was safety.

So my client wrote a special white paper/report on the 10 Most Common Accidents on a general job site and how to prevent them, and they did a calculation on what a 10% decrease in job time loss equated to in the bottom line.

You don’t think that was important to the customer strategy?

Then they proceeded to print the article and send it to a couple dozen contractors who they knew were having those problems. Now when the contractor passes that out inside their next strategy session, my contractor’s name will be on that material and will be seen as a valued resource to them accomplishing their strategies, not as a vendor who sells products.

So what are you doing to get inside your customer’s strategy room?  It’s not all that hard as long as you think about what problems you solve in doing what you do, and how the solving of those problems leads to the customer discussion of, How do we accomplish our goals? How do we meet our customer demands?

How do we grow our business?  If you can do that, you now have inserted yourself into their dialogue, and everyone wins.