Category: True Intimacy

Linkages are pre-planned connections from one offering that pulls through the next offering. The connections are made by carefully pre-planned and executed sales activities. Of course in reality, linkages do not begin at the end of one project and end at the beginning of the next. Linkages are positioning activities that take place during the initial sales process and during projects. The positioning may not only be related to the next project in the Service Chain, but also can be made with regard to the entire Service Chain.

When developing Service Chains™ it is important to evaluate their business value and your ability to implement them in the market. At McMann & Ransford, we recommend tracking the following criteria to help foster customer intimacy:

Let’s take some time and discuss the power of ideas and their importance as the central component of a True Solutions™.  Good ideas facilitate the road to true customer intimacy. 

A solution is the embodiment of an idea – and how the idea can be realized.  The idea is the kernel of the change in the relationship from pushing products and discussing business opportunities.  Often conversations that are supposed to be about solutions are really about how to better use our products and get more bang for the buck in our relationship; these are valuable issues but not True Solutions™ discussions. 

In the simplest sense, marketing has a direct role in market strategy, participation strategy, and enabling the success. Because of their unique role and perspective on the business, marketing owns or is heavily involved in the strategy of the business, and often drives the decision-making process of how to address commoditization issues.

In our line of work, we often see companies which innovate past the point that customers need or will pay for. 

We have seen this phenomenon in almost every B2B product group.

The cause?  A mistaken belief or assumption that companies can compete only through continuous innovation which is translated as continuous product differentiation.  At a certain point this leads to product over-engineering – too many features, product bloat, unnecessary complexity, and product extensions which customers dislike.  Technology replaces common sense.

Typically in the Form phase of the Customer Intimacy Journey, you will develop the initial True Solutions™ sets and take them to market. Like product development, a framework and process exists to define, develop and take your Solutions to market in a deliberate and defined manner. This building block is key to your Intimacy Engine™ success, so it is important to recognize early on what is different about developing True Solutions™ compared to typical product development.

So what is different?

Most B2B companies strive to build an intimate and trusted relationship with their customers, at least that’s what they say they want. They expend a lot of energy educating their sales professionals to work in that space thinking that this is the area most in need of help. After dedicating considerable resources and time on sales training, most find that it’s unfortunately not the panacea they hoped it would be.

Customer Intimacy is a business model change, not simply a series of training session for customer-facing employees.

Eighty-eight percent of all CEOs say getting closer to the customer is the most important dimension to realize their strategy in the next five years.  According to an IBM study, “The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.”

In senior executive circles, the idea that True Customer Intimacy is a business model transformation initiative is often greeted with knowing smiles and nods, but little understanding of what’s truly required. More often than not, the CEO expresses great interest in theCustomer Intimacy model but then wants to implement it along with 20 other initiatives, assign it to some low level committee, and hopes to be done in a year.

During the first stage of the Customer Intimacy Journey it is important to create and deliver solutions that have a visible impact with your clients. 

 As you know, terms like “solutions” and “customer intimacy” are overused in the management consulting industry, and I believe often mean too little.  In this blog, we’ll try to distinguish our thoughts with not-so-clever use of the terms True Solutions™ and Intimacy Engine™.  I want to talk about what True Solutions™ are and how it is crucial to the building of the Intimacy Engine™ business model.