Creating Customers - Key Concepts

The Customer Relationship

  • Defining the customer relationship
  • The evidence of a strong customer relationship: mutual benefit
  • Crafting solutions as a mindset and a process

 

Gathering Requirements

  • The four key benefits of a solution: business, commercial, physiological and career
  • Seeing the world through the customer’s eyes
  • Understanding language and context: same words – different meanings
  • Discovery: finding out what you need to know.
  • Learning to use questions more effectively as a tool of discovery
  • Using questions as a tool of influence

Managing a Brand

  • The relationship between management action and brand development
  • Creating brand enhancing customer relationships

 

Crafting Solutions

  • Creating the customer architecture
  • Selling the intangible: helping customers see the benefit of a solution
  • Changing priorities: Solving problems versus creating opportunities
  • The value of background research

 

The Sales Process

  • Navigating the customer organisational structure
  • Politics: how organisations make decisions
  • Gaining internal support for the solution
  • The solution sales-cycle
  • The commercial relationship: pricing a solution
  • Selling the value of a solution
  • Dealing with objections and barriers

Internal Priorities

  • Balancing the customer need and the company need
  • When internal processes and priorities don’t support the customer requirement
  • Leverage: using others to help complete the solution.

 

Understanding Yourself

  • How you see yourself
  • How others might see you
  • Understanding and observing a person's behaviour in different environments
  • Information and processing
  • Typical expression and attitudes
  • Understanding motivation and motivation styles

Negotiation and Conflict

  • Reviewing specific negotiation tactics to different types of customers
  • Conflict management
  • Follow up approaches
  • Asking for a decision

 

Improving existing relationships

  • Review each delegate's "difficult" customers
  • Review and reflect on your existing relationships based upon this new knowledge