Category: True Intimacy

Roughly 70% of all strategic alliances fail.[i]  For most companies, the concept of a strategic alliance makes sense and seems simple, so why do they consistently get it wrong? While partnership may sound straightforward, companies often commit four mistakes in selecting and executing alliances: They choose the wrong partners with misaligned strategies, They don’t clearly … Continue reading “Getting Strategic Alliances Right – Capitalizing on a Collaborative Advantage”

Talent Development & Customer Intimacy As I stated in my last post, talent is always important and is one of the key drivers of building and sustaining customer intimacy. Your people will constantly be generating new Ideas, then taking those Ideas to your customers and delivering on the promises made. In addition, these teams are accountable … Continue reading “Talent Development & Customer Intimacy”

Many of our historically product-focused clients are shifting their organizational and operational focus to address buyers’ needs in their key markets. Talent is always important but is particularly critical as businesses move to these customer intimacy-based models that require a deep understanding of the market needs. A transformation to an intimacy-based business necessitates an array … Continue reading “The Talent Imperative: Why People Make the Difference in Customer Intimacy Business Model Transformations”

    Products and Services Inevitably Commoditize. Companies Don’t Have To. Dean McMann and Mark Slotnik share how to manage account issues to build the relationship with the customer and enhance the overall customer experience.

Products and Services Inevitably Commoditize. Companies Don’t Have To. Dean McMann, Founding Partner of McMann & Ransford, discusses the importance of Customer Intimacy.

Building Customer Intimacy with the market and leveraging those relationships as a mechanism to grow share-of-wallet at your existing accounts and open doors at new accounts requires more than just new sales approaches and good relationships.  Truly realizing a Customer Intimacy strategy as a competitive advantage takes a commitment to a new way to do … Continue reading “Customer Intimacy: A Step by Step Approach to Getting Started”

In the previous entry, we discussed solution development as a process and shed some light on the intricacies needed to create a winning portfolio. Now let’s look at the design of the portfolio itself: Think about the portfolio from a holistic point of view. What are we offering that is truly important to the executives … Continue reading “Developing a Portfolio of Offers – Part II”

Here, we will discuss the importance of establishing a beachhead – a successful safe-place to expand into a market. This is important for an early solution business and for any new market/customer segment you go after. You must focus early offers on the market exclusively – it is so easy to ignore the needs of … Continue reading “Establishing a Beachhead: Introducing Customer Intimacy to the Organization”

Since it’s so important to success, let’s talk about messaging and the sales force. You must differentiate your business with clear messaging attributes which include:

• An Idea Selling™ storyboard
• Answers to key questions like:
  – “Why” they should do this
  – “How” they can do this
  – “With whom” should they do this

The Idea Selling™ storyboard must be complete but concise.  Glean out a 2-3 minute explanation of why examining the Idea is so important for the customer group – The Idea Statement.  If the story takes 15 minutes to explain, it is by definition not messaged well, too complex, or too focused on your firm’s capabilities, for this stage of your journey. 

One of the first questions we get is “Where in our business would this apply?” It’s a good question – because in many corporations, multiple customer engagement models co-exist in support of various parts of the portfolio – and will continue to do so. To answer the question, it helps to think about the nature … Continue reading “Where Does Customer Intimacy Apply in Your Business?”