Setting The Stage: The first step is preparing to hold sea change conversations with selected customers. You will want to identify those customers who hold the most potential as partners. These may not be the most comfortable old friends. They almost certainly aren’t your most compliant.
Rather, think about your customers who are the most creative or forward thinking. They may be customers who stretch you, perhaps the ones who are challenging for you to work with.
That is, the ones who make you think, the one’s who are pulling you to work with them in ways that are beyond your current comfort zones. Even thinking like this is enough to chase away those of you who want to coast along in your business-as-usual bubble. This is not an easy path, but productive paths are seldom smooth and all down hill.
- Identify potential customer partners.
- Consider how you may do what you do in ways that provide additional, and possibly unique, value to those select customers.
- Use your own team to generate ideas about how you may reposition your relationships with these customers to be productive for you and them.
- Generate a list of questions to ask them that will focus them on telling you how they think you can be a better partner for them.
- How can you help them to think about your relationship in a different way that creates new options for working together, and generates new sources of value for the two of you?
- How can you help them deliver their brand promises more powerfully or more consistently?
- How can you share information in a way that generates value for one or both of you?
Gathering The Intelligence: Contact these best potential customers and/or suppliers. Contract for Purpose , that is, clarify what outcomes from meeting could be valuable to both of you. What are you hoping for? What may they get out of it?
Establish a setting (a time, place, and atmosphere) that’s conducive for friendly, exploratory conversations. Perhaps it is a one-on-one meeting at first, but over time, you want to include as many of your people in this dialogue as possible.
This meeting doesn’t have to do it all. Let it lay the groundwork for continuing conversations. Express your interest in, and commitment to, building relationships with better value for each of you – without it sounding like a scheme to pick the other guy’s pocket.
Listen. Ask for feedback. Ask about the customer’s challenges and ambitions for their own future. This is more a meeting for learning about them than for selling (or bragging about) you and your company.
Reading The Signs: After the meeting/conversation, go back with your people and as soon as possible, consider what you’ve heard.
- Were there any surprises?
- What did you learn?
- Take this information and consider it in relation to your business idea and the fundamental market assumptions that support it.
- Where are the challenges and opportunities?
Developing Strategies: Expect to turn what you learn into action plans. This is a good place to use many of the tools of the smart organization, to think about the opportunities and how to learn from your conversations with customers.
Appoint a devil’s advocate to challenge stodgy thinking and traditional perspectives. Consider deploying a red team/blue team strategy to explore ideas and generate innovative responses.
Connecting: Set steps in motion to further strengthen these conversational connections between your company and key customers. Gradually, you can expand these conversations to a broader group of customers, particularly once you have more of a story to tell. (See the Using Storytelling To Build Business tool)
Consider the benefit of this approach to bonding/connecting, as compared to golf outings and fishing trips for good customers. Many customers, while they enjoy them, have developed a sense of entitlement about them.
Others tend to look at those events cynically - You don’t really work closely with them to create value, but instead, you host a golf junket or a hunting trip to Canada. Maybe you keep them happy and do something that you enjoy and can write off at the same time.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this sort of thing, unless it’s your only strategy for tying customers to you and your products. People will like you better if you treat them to something fun.
However, it doesn’t buy the kind of loyalty that will generate extraordinary performance or results for you.