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Many business leaders recognize the keys to success—to competitive advantage and to profitability lie in customer relationships and customer retention. Taking advantage of this insight is another matter. It requires a different mindset—one that fosters collaboration and teamwork across functions and one that institutes and shares better operational control. Our Align for Success Webinars/Workshops are designed to get managers and their cross-functional group leaders in sales and marketing and customer service as well as their support staff—business analysts, business intelligence, IT, and HR professionals—aligned and prepared to collaborate in developing profitable customer relationships. Measuring and managing success in developing profitable customer relationships is our new breakthrough way to measure and manage sales and marketing. Our Customer-Focused Performance Executive Briefing shows executives
how to become customer-focused and capitalize on this insight for
competitive advantage and profit with the Religence Framework through
real-time, shared operational control. Align
for Success Webinars/Workshops
2. Align for Customer Retention Breakthrough growth of profitable revenue comes when attention is paid to customer relationships and customer retention. Customer retention is where the money is. Customer relationships are so important, they warrant the new function, on a par with marketing and sales, of customer retention. New, unifying roles for marketing, sales, and customer service need to be defined that expand responsibilities beyond acquisition and closing into retention and that use the common language of profit to align strategy and execution.
3. Align for Value Customers purchase products and services only when they perceive there is a value to be gained by acquiring those products or services. Yet in many companies there are both individuals and whole departments who don't know what their customers consider to be the elements of value. The gap in knowledge and understanding of customer value often leads to poorly positioned products, sub-optimized processes, and dissatisfied customers—or to no customers at all.
4. Align for Technology Innovation In today's marketplace, leading-edge technology and low costs often are not competitive advantages—they are required just to be in the market. Sustainable competitive advantage comes through establishing and fostering relationships with your customers. Yet, there are many barriers to creating close relationships with your customers, and often these barriers are ones that your company's products and services have created!
5. Align for Profit
6. Align for Strategy Execution Although there is much more sophistication in terms of developing strategy and offerings, many executives are uncertain about how their strategy is being executed with customers. More relevant intelligence about customer relationships and the process used to develop them is needed to take strategy down to the level where it is executed—on the frontline through interactions with customers. Executing strategy, retaining customers, and earning profit require a customer-focused orchestration of functions across the company.
How to Get Started We suggest starting by inviting us in for either our executive briefing or a workshop on one or two of the topics listed above for your group leaders. Each of the topic areas can be presented as half-day or full-day workshops—so you could have us in for a series of half-day workshops or do an offsite lasting several days, whichever format works best for you. In the workshops the topics can be customized and combined in ways that meet your needs best. We can take an action learning approach or we can present the concepts more generally. Religence’s own Kathleen Robinson highly recommends the action learning team approach. Kathleen is a sales and marketing change management expert who learned the value of organizational effectiveness by helping build a multi-million dollar direct sales company from the ground up, where she had responsibility for marketing and business development. Why she likes the action learning approach is that your people learn by doing and by directly applying the concepts to their work experience. Your teams master the new process and know enough to teach others, making the spread of the new way of doing things occur more quickly throughout your organization. We
have a wealth of material to draw upon in the body of knowledge we've built in the Religence Framework. We can help you take the
next steps—and the ones after that—on the path to profiting from
a customer focus and in bringing a customer focus to marketing,
operations, and finance. Watch our calendar. Starting in Fall, 2008, introductory Align for Success webinars on these topics will be webcast by the Association for the Advancement of Relationship Marketing (AARM), who is sponsoring the series. Their President Robert Stacey had this to say about our CEO's new book Customer Relationship Intelligence: A Breakthrough Way to Measure and Manage Sales and Marketing:
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