Customer Centric Interface Management
The relative immaturity of process standardization in the customer interface management sphere compared to various other business processes has contributed to inefficient deployment of customer interface management automation leading to continued low percentage of salespeople meeting their budgets across industries. Various studies have shown that less than 40 percent actually meet their targets and, even today, 20 percent of the sales teams contribute to most of the business. The addition of more than 40,000 reps in the pharmaceutical industry in North America between 1995 and 2001 is a case in point.
Today, the traditional definition of selling as a manipulative process to persuade the customer is neither valid nor tenable. The role has evolved over time to become relationship management and is rapidly moving toward a more customer centric methodology that is starting to become popular in the business-to-business domain as engagement management. This perpetual mode of relating to the customers needs is creating newer and more scientific metrics to measure the efficacy of interface management. The use of sales grid concepts could form the basis of future state engagement management metrics. Stakeholders to sales process management and automation would hardly be able to ignore this.
Customer Centricity
Simply defined, customer centricity is the emotional connect between the customer and the sales person toward building a mutually successful solution and not just a perceived individual win. Reaching an agreement is not the same as a mutually successful solution. The former ends the salespersons anxiety of affecting the sale but shifts the anxiety to the customer in the form of post-purchase blues, which can lead to mistrust.
The tactical view of the customer interactivity revolves around the transaction at hand and potential objection-handling techniques. The strategic perspective entails a deeper appreciation of customer requirements and value relating it to the proposition at hand through transparent discussion of objections. This is ingrained as the guiding principle right through the relationship history from contact to contract to perpetual engagements.
The puritans need not worry about this approach since it does not hijack the SPANCO or the SPIN, two traditional professional-selling programs that have stood the test of time.
Impacting Changes In The Sales Roles
At this stage, it would be relevant to analyze key changes in the in roles that have happened during the last few decades.
First was the birth of the call center industry, fueled by the advances in the telecommunications industry. With the launch of the 1-800 types of service, a significant part of the suspect, prospect and qualify stage was taken over by remote customer interface. Screen prompts, customer databases, and run-books ushered in some process standardization and even achieved reasonable success toward bringing down the cost of sales further savings through offshore response management is indeed in the offing. Remote customer interface also removed the power of face-to-face customization of customer interactivity.
As an outcome of all these changes, the role of customer interface is considered to have been diluted from that of a persuader to that of a detailer. The former has contributed to an emphasis on approach, negotiate and close (according to the SPANCO program) and the latter has contributed less and less to the same. A better informed customer has less time for the frills in the sales pitch but, as a corollary, has more time for extracting value or at least seeking it.
Right-to-privacy, permission marketing, and anti-spam laws are some regulatory controls that followed the explosion of multichannel direct marketing. These controls are contributing significantly to the way customer information is generated and used.
In addition, the Internet has augmented information quantity and quality and the growing boom in Internet retail buying has created genuine self-help purchases. This is one inflection point worth discussing in detail. Educational psychologists often refer to four stages of internalization of concepts as:
1. Unconscious incompetence, the stage of not knowing the unknowns;
2. Conscious incompetence, the stage of knowing of the unknowns;
3. Conscious competence, the stage of personal sensitization to the now known; and
4. Unconscious competence, being nonchalant about the learned.
Traditional selling techniques were relating to customer knowledge in the first two stages of learning. Today, the self-help customer is almost at stage four, making mature and transparent interactions a reality. This is making it almost inevitable for interactions to happen at this frequency. Clearly, the well-informed customer puts significant emphasis on information value. The salesperson must bring greater granularity to the interaction. Usually, information value is hidden in the depths beyond the superficial knowledge of products.
Examples of this are clearly seen in the results from various studies in the pharmaceutical industry, where for every 100 reps who meet a physician, less than five are meaningfully remembered.
The number of reps almost doubled to 80,000 during a five-year period; this statistic hides the cause of physician message retention. The advances in pervasive computing through wireless PDAs and Tablet PCs surely provide relief to the field reps from a contentaccess perspective.
Coming to grips with this new role is a challenge for the salesperson and for the sales process optimization industry from the perspective of metrics identification, benchmarks, and standards in customer centric interface management; and from the perspective of building a theoretical foundation for such interactions.
Some challenges can be met only by bringing a little more science into sales. Therefore, we define sales as the art of helping customers make the right decisions.
Customer Management Grids
Typically, for the salesperson, the choice between customer centricity and sale-centricity is actually a Hobsons choice. However, moving to a comprehensive customer centric model is a direction, given that the dichotomy of the two options does exist.
The customer management grids provide a graphical representation of the present state of the interactivity environment through simplistic X-Y plots, each axis representing one of the two choices of centricity in the salesperson Customer or Sale. Each of the axis at the low end of the scale define the lower maturity attributes with respect to that specific coordinate, and the high end defines the highest maturity. Figure 1 illustrates such a plot on a nine-point scale, with (1,1) being at the lowest end and (9,9) at the highest end.
Each intersection point helps define the present state of the mindset of the salesperson with specific reference to this contact. One could customize the grid with various attributes of sale-centricity and customer centricity through clear articulation of the ambient conditions of the score in that specific axis. Although Figure 1 defines the boundary conditions alone, we could have very granular intersections. Through the help of these plots, we could have a contact-level view, a customer-level view, or a companywide view on the degree of customer centricity in the sales organization. These could be correlated with other grids that represent other business objectives such as business potential or targets or forecast accuracy on one axis and actual business achievements on the other.
The customer management grid could define the contact and content attributes in greater detail on the relevant axis and, based on the maturity achieved in that attribute, the specific point in the coordinate could be plotted. Lets decipher Figure 1, a simplistic boundary condition plot of five scenarios.
From a planning perspective, we could look at the customer mindset in the buying process by plotting the customer dichotomies, the purchase centricity, and the vendor-partner centricity or even competitive mindset plots. Each of these also ranges from low to high. Depending on how they combine, they reveal five basic customer grid styles, each with an own unique strategy and tactic for interacting with salespeople. This would help articulate the input criteria.
Assumptions Guide Behavior
Each of the five grid plots is based on a unique set of assumptions that lead to a fundamentally different way of orienting oneself with the customer.
Assumptions are those things we take for granted as being true or reliable in producing an effect. They are at the center of the customary selling strategy. Without assumptions, we would have no sales strategy at all when interacting with a customer. Such behavior would be random, aimless, and purposeless.
Assumptions are what give customer interactions their special character, and the assumptions we act on to get the sale are what can make one salesperson a star or limit another salespersons effectiveness in various ways and in varying degrees. Even so, it is not enough just to have any old style or strategy with corresponding sales tactics. Faulty assumptions can lead to poor sales results. Salespeople, however, do not often question their own basic assumptions. It is a good practice to do so as a way of checking on the health of the sell.
Action Steps To A Customer-Centric Customer Interactivity Practice
It is relevant to define the way to move forward with such a practice through simple introspection of a customer-centric health check. It could be done through some simple steps as shown in Figure 2.
The sustained practice of customer-centric interactivity would ensure that the relationship paradigm that we see and hear continues. It would also bring about some radical changes in the sales process automation industry that until today operated largely on a contact management foundation.
