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2. HOW Well Are You Aligned for Success? What contributes to or colors your success? What strengths can you leverage? What weaknesses do you need to shore up? Our Align for Success Factor self-diagnosis method is a reality check management teams use to see how prepared they are to deal with customers and the marketplace. The tool is one of several of our models to quantify “what is” and help stimulate ideas for “what could be” done differently. (See our profit matrix for another.) Using the method helps build consensus among the management team of what is practical to do over the next couple of years to strengthen the market position and to create a more positive selling and retaining environment. What could take days of assessment and consensus building without the model, can now be done in half a day. The Align for Success Factor diagnostic tool helps quantify the market opportunity and the elements of customer value—brand value, product value, and relationship value. It evaluates potential for success in Acquisition, Closing, and Retention—the stages in the continuum that make up the customer lifecycle. It is not linear. For example, how well-known your brand is and how clear the promises you make are matter more in Acquisition than Retention, but they still matter in Retention. The opposite is true in terms of the delivery and use of your product—they matter more in Retention, but still matter in Acquisition. Our model considers all of this and nearly 100 more external and internal considerations that success in strategy execution and value creation depends on. It is based on decades of experience in sales and marketing and paying attention to the elements of success. Since not that many companies have made the transition to being customer centric yet, most of those who’ve assessed themselves with the tool end up in the yellow zone for status quo. But all of them have wanted to move into green—so the curve in the following example is typical in our experience.
The management team of this company rated itself at a positive 1.5 or C+ in the current state or status quo. They could see ways to move to the more desirable green zone and a positive 5.5 or B+. The baseline is 0.0 and the rating is from a negative to a positive 10.0. And they could agree on several things that they just weren’t going to do—they weren’t cost effective. Here’s what the management team did want to do:
All were ideas they could put to good use in customer relationship strategy development using our strategy decision model and several pointed to critical interaction processes that they thought they needed to take care of immediately. A Voice of the Customer survey confirmed what they thought about their process and added insight on what was truly important to their customers. |
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