A not-so-banal question crucial to moving your sales team productivity and strategy to The Next Level

Last week we posed this trivial sounding question and looked at some living examples to show why this question is not as trivial as it may seem. A not-so-banal question crucial to moving your sales team productivity and strategy to The Next Level

From a sales team productivity and strategy perspective, here at The Next Level, we exhort B2B sales organisations to apply a wide and “value chain” oriented definition to “customer”.  If you take the time to internally debate and document all the players in your value chain, you will see that the usual narrow definition of the customer starts to display shades of grey.  We argue that any player in the value chain, think….

• Wholesalers/distributors
• Value adders/formers
• Installers/fabricators
• Specifiers/key opinion leaders
• End users/asset owners/consumers

……..are all “customers”.  Why?  Because they all play a role in the degree of successful consumption of your product/service versus the competition and alternative product/service.  Considering one segment as “the customer” can leave you blind sided, with your blinkers on.  Like the manufacturer who considers the retailer the customer, and not the intermediary wholesaler.  Only to wake up one day to find that with a new product innovation entering the market, the wholesalers allocated support to their competitor manufacturer in shoring up volume of existing product type flowing through to retailers.  Why? Because the competitor had nurtured the relations all along and treated these wholesalers as a customer from the get go.

Don’t leave yourself blind sided.