But This Level of Competition is Too Often Ignored

In our experience, most businesses do not take full advantage of the latent power in their customer relationships. They put far too much emphasis on things like gathering "customer data", running statistical analyses, reading market research reports, studying the competitors products and far too little emphasis on learning about their customers as people. Most businesses devote far too much time and effort to internal issues, and far to little time and effort to the seemingly more complex, less quantifiable relationships with their customers.

Learn, Unite, Win

This program focuses on a small number of people in our client businesses. We help managers select people who can represent a broad cross-section of internal stakeholder groups. We train and coach those people to develop the knowledge, skills and processes they need to connect as people with their customers and their prospects better than their best competitors can.

We help people get out of their endless string of internal meetings, get out the door and into in their customers' workplaces. That's where they learn about the customers and about each other in ways that lead to winning customers, to co-creating value and to defining their business to win those customers, and others like them.

Our Customer Relationship Development Program in a Nutshell

Program Planning

We deliver consulting and coaching services to managers responsible for the program to help them define its scope and objectives:

• Set challenging but achievable expectations.
• Define limitations, e.g. budget, time line.
• Select team members for behavioral style and stakeholder representation.

Effective Customer Interviews Workshop

Our Customer Interviews Workshop presents the skills and processes that we have developed over the past 12 years in a concise 1-day interactive workshop.

Coaching Customer Relationship Development Teams

Interview teams learn a lot in our Customer Interview Workshop, but the development of the skills and effective use of the processes needed to become a proficient interview team takes practice and a process of continual improvement.

That process of continual improvement proceeds much faster and reaches higher levels of proficiency if the team has a coach, particularly during the first 10 or 20 interviews, where both good and bad habits are most like to become well established.

We deploy a coach to travel with the teams. The coach may facilitate the briefings and debriefings, apply just in time training between interviews, and help the team members to overcome the inevitable disappointments that come with learning any new skill.

Our coach participates as an observer during the interviews, much like a tennis coach would do. We only rarely engage in the interview process, usually to help the interviewer in difficult situations.

Understanding the Results

The process described so far is very similar to the first phases of the Quality Function Deployment Process, as it was defined and used in Japan. Adoption of QFD by the western cultures too often omitted the human relationships between the interview teams and the customers. In the Japanese culture, that was taken more or less for granted. In the western cultures, it was defined as gathering the Voice of the Customer - a much more data driven process.

The process we use is more like the original Japanese method. It is relationship-based, not data-based. Therefore the outcome is relatively unstructured. Normal data reduction process cannot be successfully applied to get the most useful analysis.

We offer coaching and training to help the interview teams to convert the so-called VOC into highly valuable solutions connected strongly to the wants and needs of the customers.