Jim Dickie

This month, CustomerThink is focused on Building a Customer-Centric Culture and Operation. A worthwhile goal, but how do you do that? I had the opportunity to interview Jeff Schaper when he was the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at General Electric, and thought for my blog this month I would share some of Jeff’s insights on how to manage this type of transition:

Jeff Schaper:

FOCUSING ON THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER

We all understand that today customers typically want more than just a product. If all they need to do is complete a transaction, they can go on the web and put it out for bid. Our goal, therefore, becomes to understand what a customer really wants and needs, and in order to accomplish that we have to change our focus from the product out, to the customer back. By that I mean seeing things from the perspective of the customer looking back into the organization.

This often tends to be a struggle. We talk a lot about...

One of the most Customer-centric executives I know is Bob Knebel, Vice President of Sales for Bombardier Flexjet. Bob is committed to continuous improvement in people and processes and is recognized by his peers as a superior change agent, capable of motivating sales teams and customers alike. The following is an excerpt of an interview I did with Bob when he was the Vice President of Domestic Sales for the Citation division of Cessna Aircraft Company. Since Bob always views the Customer as starting with a capital C, I have done the same. Here are some of the thoughts Bob shared with me on Customer-Centricity:

In our industry we have come to realize that it is not nearly as important that our Customers understand our strategies as it is for us to understand theirs. Our Customers will be the ones that define what ‘competitive advantage’ really means, whether overtly or not, and will somehow indicate that to us. To succeed, we had better be ready to listen and respond...

When I saw that the topic of this month’s editorial focus was Turning Your Employees into Ambassadors for Your Company, two thoughts came to mind. First, how many executives would conceptually embrace the idea? Second, how many companies really invest the time, energy, and financial resources to make it happen?

Answering the first question seemed relatively easy to me. In hundreds of discussions Barry Trailer and I have had with CEOs. CSOs, CMOs, etc. over the past year nearly everyone mouths these words: customer-focused, vendor/customer partnering, solution-centricity, etc. We all say we want to be more than just a vendor to our customers and we all understand that a major part of that means establishing meaningful relationships between our people and our customer’s people.

But now let’s take a look at what we do. In our 2007 call center study we found that many firms measure their service center reps performance based on...

There is a disconnect between sales goals and the actual benefits companies are receiving from their CRM systems. That's one of the most important findings that came out of CSO Insights' 12th annual Sales Effectiveness Study. Addressing that disconnect can have dramatic effects on sales organizations and make 2006 a year to remember.

The study, which was compiled from what more than 1,250 companies worldwide told us about how well (or poorly) their sales organizations were performing, looked at more than 120 metrics.

The first of these was identifying what were the top three goals sales executives have for their teams for 2006, and the second was reviewing what benefits organizations were deriving from their investments in CRM technology.

In Figure 1, we see the four goals most commonly cited by managers who took part in the study. Here are the bread and butter of sales: more revenues, improved sales effectiveness, greater market share and increased...