In professional sports the separation between the pro’s and all others is discussed as the “speed of the game”. Not being a professional athlete, I never thought I would experience the “speed” phenomena first hand. But if you are in business today and your job has anything to do with customers, then you are experiencing a new Speed of the Game. Here’s what I mean:
We will use these highly engineered pictures I’ve carefully crafted just for this conversation.
This picture represents the game as it has been played in B2B. You have a Supplier with complex solutions and a Customer with complex needs. The important person in the middle is Sales. All of the arrows are communication, ranging from new products and services to feeding back new customer challenges. If we were to draw a box around the entire picture and call it a production system, we would quickly determine through a Lean event or a kindergartener might mention to us, that there is a productivity bottleneck. The bottleneck is the Sales person. We have worked hard to improve productivity by making the sales person more efficient with CRM tools, Sales Effectiveness training and the rest. But it is just a person.
A new model has emerged that is completely changing the speed of the game. It has its roots in Customer Value and a backbone of connectivity between customers and suppliers. My artistic characterization of the model is below. In the new model communication of data, information, knowledge is being channeled around the Sales person through the Cloud. The Cloud is enabling visibility and use of technology on a Global basis.
Characteristics of the New Model:
- Kind of Scary: As a supplier in the old model you may have felt some level of control. Even though the production unit may not have been optimized, your sales person was at the center of everything. She was likely the most aware person in the production unit and you and your customer relied on her expertise. That model may not be done but is has changed!
- Good news: There is definitely good news in this new world of speed. The first being that if you are adding value to your customers then you have great potential for more customers finding out. If you are not then…never mind. If you are not really sure then you should find out fast and leverage the knowledge to beat the competition, be that to fix underperforming offerings or leveraging your advantage.
- Figure out the Arrows: There are new tools available to increase productivity of the production unit. These tools embody much bigger ideas than those aimed at increasing the efficiency of the sales person. These new tools are targeted at creating more touch points between customer and supplier, bridging corporate boundaries to see data and use analytics to maximize production, create exposure to an entire supplier organization on what matters to the customer so innovation can happen faster.
The Speed of the Game is changing! Think for a moment how this is fundamentally changing your business. Is it that we’ve been training fighter pilots (sales) only to find out the world is now filled with drones and gamers (marketers)?
Check out Other Blogs in this Series:
- Customer Value: Customer Value and Speed are Changing Everything in B2B
- Customer Value: What is Scaring Your C-Suite
- Customer Value: "Speed of the Game": Welcome to the new Customer Value Reality<--You Are Here!
- Customer Value: Achieving Speed with Simple (Coming Soon!)
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