“What is the point of innovation for innovation’s sake, if your customer does not benefit?
– Nigel Brotherton

In the fourth installment to the series of conferences created by our four sponsors, Customer Attuned, Deep-Insight, eBECS and Star Commercial Academy, gave host to three senior executives from different industries who gave their perspectives on what leading edge means in their sector.

Luvata Operations Director, Chris Russell shared the company’s journey to combine operational and commercial excellence within a Global B2B Industrial Enterprise – being a €1.6 BN company operating in 19 countries with 36 plants and with over 6,500 employees is not a simple or easy feat.

Facing an operations conundrum, Luvata developed a blended approach focused on operations through Luvata Production System (LPS) and improving how customers were managed through Luvata Sales System (LSS) utilising the Customer Attuned Assessment tool.
This aimed to develop value benefits within the supply chain that the customer management teams could lock in for value enhancement within their customers base and to win new business “Achieving Leading Edge requires working together to improve end-to-end “flow”’.

The results from this blended approach showed Luvata how efficiency and effectiveness gains could be achieved within operations and how to translate this into customer gains.
The operational excellence (Op – Ex) team of specialists developed a 16-week, step-by-step, plan to convert the outcomes into practice, meet operational capabilities and tailor the different parts of the business into an actionable plan and overcome inertia. “Don’t underestimate the importance of having a succinct period of time to build and keep momentum on making change”.

“Achieving leading edge comes with a host of difficulties.” Chris confessed “Its vital that you have the right technical people in place, ensure there is a champion steering change and coaching at every level, and recognise the failures – if you’re working with “off-the-shelf” tools, don’t expect them to work for your business. Invest in the right systems for your operations and customer management.”

Luvata boasts a long list of operational achievements since the assessment – stable customer base, new negotiations on new and existing customers, gained profitability despite the recession and what pleased them most was capacity increases that came for FREE – by simply improving efficiency and deliverables.

Volkswagen Group UK CRM Development Manager, Nigel Brotherton, spoke candidly on Building a Deeper Understanding of Customer Value in their Commercial Vehicle operation.

You would think that the Volkswagen Group is predominantly a company working in the B2C sector, but Nigel revealed that actually over 50% of its sales came from B2B customers – fleet and commercial vehicles. He affectionately nicknamed B2B as the “Invisible man” because so many of the systems and processes deployed were originally designed for traditional car retailing to consumers (i.e. B2C).

Sharing a current active project with the audience, Nigel and Peter Lavers of Customer Attuned gave an honest account of how they have begun their journey towards leading edge customer value management (CVM).

SCHEMA CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT
INVOLVE LEADERSHIP TO ALIGN CUSTOMER CENTRICITY (Direction Shaper)
RUN A CVM ANALYSIS & MODELLING

Starting with a SCHEMA® Capability Assessment that established the start-point of the journey with an independent and completely honest recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of the brand when it comes to CVM. “Unless you uncover a ‘burning platform’, it’s going to take a lot of convincing for the board to change direction to become more customer-centric”.

The next step in the journey involved getting leadership alignment about just how customer-centric it aspired to be, recognising that every company must make trade-offs to create its own vision.

“In my opinion the SCHEMA Direction Shaper has to be best 2 hours a management team can spend together on deciding the customer focus of the company. Thrashing out and prioritising what we want to make us distinctive in key aspects of CVM was an imperative exercise”.

The third step was a CVM analysis and modelling tool that puts a profitability value on every customer and enables sophisticated analytics of value grouping, model, tenure, finance & service penetration, etc. This tool threw up some status-quo-challenging results and was also used to build the business case for achieving the vision set out in the Direction Shaping workshop.

The recommendations from the whole exercise were then prioritised to build the capabilities needed to achieve that prize.
Nigel’s parting comment was that Volkswagen Group will indeed be leading edge only when the CVM ‘lens’ on brand performance is reviewed at the highest levels on an equal footing with traditional Auto Sector sales, operations and satisfaction results.

With a focus on insight into customer relationships, BT Ireland Operations Director, Mairead McSweeney spoke passionately about the importance of building trusted relationships with top customers. Like many B2B organisations, the Pareto Rule (20% of customers account for 80% of the revenues) applies, so BT Ireland focuses on its Top 150 accounts in its annual Deep-Insight customer assessment.

“We really wanted to find out how we could make it easier for our Business customers to do business with us. The Deep-Insight results were so insightful that we immediately devised a new way for key account managers to work more effectively with their customers – and to make them accountable, so that they didn’t just blame the ‘system’ for internal delivery issues – and the change was remarkable”.

Having worked with Deep-Insight for the past six years, BT Ireland found that one of the most effective mechanisms for changing employee behaviour was through its reward mechanisms. Deep-Insight’s CRQ (Customer Relationship Quality) scores became the key metric for rewarding staff. All staff, from the CEO down to the account teams and service engineers, have a significant portion of their annual bonus determined by their CRQ score.

But that wasn’t enough. “Monetary reward excitement only lasts a nanosecond, so we developed a personal reward system for anybody whose name was mentioned in the Deep-Insight verbatim’s – tickets to a match, theatre, whatever that member of staff was interested in – which was delivered with a personal letter from the CEO – now that created a HUGE sense of motivation and accountability in the company”.

Furthermore, not only does BT reward the account manager, they ask them to nominate 3 people in non-customer-facing activities across the company who had helped them deliver a better service to their customers – this has been the catalyst in changing the culture of the organisation to working together.

Another insightful day was seamlessly conducted by the brilliant master of ceremonies and comedian, Neil Mullarkey, who broke up the sessions with ice-breakers using improv techniques to create that mood of cohesiveness and collaboration amongst the audience, introducing the audience to skills from the theatre for the business environment.

In a number of games, where delegates were chosen at random from the audience, Neil’s techniques gave us all valuable lessons:

The OFFER: How do you make sure the client has a good time? You have to present them with something that they can accept!
The BLOCK: How do you turn a conversation around when the client blocks you?

The underlying message in any conversation or negotiation is to start with a positive statement to lift the energy in the room, that way what you’re about to deliver will be far more accepted.

What Does Leading Edge Mean to B2B Customer Management?

What is considered Leading Edge B2B Social Engagements?

“Ignorance isn’t bliss” – B2B can’t ignore social media and must listen and be ready to engage when and where their customers start to adopt it
Twitter should be used as a B2B medium, especially for thought leadership
So far it seems Facebook works well as a B2B tool in the US, but hasn’t done so here across the pond, where Brits tend to compartmentalise their business and personal profiles
Some great examples came to light from the audience – Toyota Handling, eBECS Yammer User Group, Reed Elsevier Exhibitions social log-in.

How to keep Customer Focus and Leading Edge Technical Excellence?

This is a tough nut to crack! Great technical experts often aren’t blessed with great interpersonal skills!
Initiate a Sales Academy with different modules that are tailored to the different roles – recognise the completely dissimilar learning aims!
Recruit for attitude & cultural fit first
This issue makes the Account Manager’s role even more vital – to ‘front’ technical people who perhaps have lower customer interaction skills – not to try and do it all – doesn’t work

Leading edge ways to reward the delivery of a great customer experience:

• Firstly, have a clear line-of-sight for everyone to the end customer – know what the key touchpoints are and make it as seamless as possible
• Integrate and maintain relationship quality KPIs in scorecards and commissions – this is key to building momentum and motivation; it trickles down from the top and makes cultural change easier
• Know who your customer ambassadors are and support the staff that manage those accounts
• Reward the top 10 CRQ ‘leaps’; then get them to nominate 3 non-sales people who contributed to the ‘leap’

Innovation vs. Leading Edge?

L Duncan is quoted as saying “Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices” – there must always be commercially sensible application!
Innovation is a ‘buzz’ word but can be a curse if it’s not tested against customer needs. What is the point of innovation for innovation’s sake, if your customer does not benefit?
Many companies aren’t short of ideas, but do fall down in execution. Being leading edge is more about commercialisation than being the first to market with everything
Being leading edge isn’t just about PRODUCTS – or even NEW products! It’s about customer-centred ways of working (which include innovation & NPD)

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Ellie Luk

Ellie is responsible for a number of areas at Customer Attuned; as Director, she is responsible in ensuring the company delivers against the company strategy.

As Head of Marketing, Ellie handles the day-to-day execution and deployment of marketing and business development campaigns.

And as Project Manager, Ellie overseas clients projects keeping them on track and ensuring they are delivered within scope and on budget.