among executive customers and moves to the right of the Continuum, the premium decision makers are willing to pay for solutions begins to rise in their minds. If the B2B seller is stuck on the left side of the Relationship Continuum (again, in the minds of executive customers, whether or not that perception is an accurate reflection of reality), the company will only be able to command commodity pricing and the low margins that go with it.
B2B companies such as HCL need a marketing strategy and supporting tactics which are capable of positioning them farther to the right on the Relationship Continuum. Executive customers are indispensible for such a move. They are the opinion makers who matter the most and they drive the perception of a company in the B2B marketplace. Tactically speaking, they are also the peers their colleagues look to for information and recommendations. Credible third parties, such as industry analysts from research services like Forrester and Gartner, and messaging campaigns that repeat and amplify the perceptions of executive customers are useful and effective supporting tactics too, but executive customers are the cornerstone of reputation-building initiatives.
Decision makers become even more important as a company moves farther to the right on the Relationship Continuum. As B2B companies seek to assume roles as trusted advisors and business partners, they need enthusiastic executive customers who are willing to share their stories with their peers. It is very difficult to make a case that a B2B company is capable of acting as a trusted advisor or a valued business partner if no customer will step up to confirm or validate its claims.
The B2B Path to SPPG
In this chapter, I have discussed the critical differences between B2B and B2C companies which can be boiled down to three main points:
Revenue is controlled by relatively few customers
Decision makers are not users
B2B executives must leverage the domain knowledge of their customer executive decision maker peers
The needs, hopes, and aspirations of decision makers must be intimately understood and addressed because they literally hold the fate of your company in their decision-making hands. You can gain this critical knowledge by actively engaging decision makers to drive your company to SPPG. The balance of the Playbook will show you how they will help develop your strategy, fuel innovation, design marketing and sales plans, and align your leadership team.
CHAPTER 3
SIX BENEFITS, FOUR STEPS
TAPPING THE POWER OF EXECUTIVE CUSTOMERS
Very few B2B companies have fully engaged and developed substantive relationships with their executive customers. Most companies ignore executive customers, often not realizing how important they are to B2B success. Instead, they focus their relationship-building efforts on lower levels of the customer hierarchy. Other B2B companies relegate relationships with executive customers to their sales and marketing departments. Unfortunately, however, this usually results in an approach to executive customer relationship-building that treats these most important decision makers as sales targets. All of these companies are missing valuable opportunities to drive SPPG.
Companies that adopt a more strategic mindset in their approach to executive customers and in the development of these invaluable relationships can capture six opportunities:
Market and leadership team alignment
Strategic insight
Marketing direction
Improved sales retention, penetration, and references
Innovation that is relevant and important to decision makers and a critical mass of the market
Sustainable, predictable, profitable growth (SPPG)
Market and Leadership Team Alignment
The leadership teams of many B2B companies are beset with conflict. Often, this conflict is based on competing opinions about how to best move the company ahead. Some members of the team have rogue ideas; others categorically resist change; still others have a “not-invented-here” mindset that can blind them to external developments that could have a powerful effect on the company and its markets. Further, the personal ambitions of leadership team members can stifle alignment and consensus, and limit support for critical initiatives.
There is no better means of overcoming these sources of conflict than executive customers. When the leadership team of a B2B company works directly with executive customers, it becomes more unified and aligned. These customers, especially when gathered together in a group, provide an unimpeachable source of information, insight, and opinion that acts as a filter—quickly dispatching the conflicting views that can splinter a company’s strategic focus or create barriers to change. An executive customer collective provides a single point of reference for the entire leadership team—in contrast to the information overload and endless debates, which can paralyze companies when key decisions and faster and bolder moves are most needed.
We’ve seen first-hand how executive customers deliver this benefit at many of our client companies. At Springer Science+Business Media, a global leader in scientific and professional publishing, customer executives have provided valuable input that enabled the company’s leaders and directors to make important decisions about pricing and business models in an industry that has been buffeted by technological change. Executive customers also provide Springer’s leaders with the clarity and focus they needed to speed market and product planning, and build internal support and performance.
Executive customers have had a similar effect at Wells Fargo, which has quadrupled the number of its programs aimed at engaging top customer decision makers from 5 to 12 in recent years. “Our executive customer programs have been incredible for our leadership team,” explains senior vice president Jeff Tinker. “They continue to validate our challenges, our thinking, and where we should be going. They definitely help keep us aligned to their needs, which in turn ensures greater internal alignment.”
Strategic Insight
Because executive customers are the leaders of their companies, they face many of the same business challenges with which B2B executives grapple. Both must make the same hard decisions involving investment trade-offs, prioritization, budgeting strains, and resource limitations—and they must make them in good time and deliver returns that justify their decisions. Executive customers not only relate to the challenges B2B sellers face, they also have the expertise in the industry to offer tangible strategic insight on how to address them.
When this insight, experience, and knowledge is combined with the internal expertise of a B2B leadership team, it creates a springboard for solving what often seem to be intractable management problems. And of course, the market insights of executive customers, individuals who have the most B2B buying clout, are unparalleled. They bring new perspectives and fresh ideas that give B2B leadership teams the clarity and confidence they need to make bold strategic decisions.
As Lisa Campbell, the general manager at Autodesk’s geospatial business unit attests, “Our customer executive programs have been instrumental in both our business and product planning. They have impacted so many areas of our business and have definitely changed our approach and our results in positive ways.”
Marketing Direction
Since executive customers
