"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss . . ."
- The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again
As we learned in my previous blog, Right Metric, Wrong People: The Sad Case of SuperSoftware Inc., any company that sells high-value products to large companies needs to confront an essential fact: not everyone at their target companies has the same degree of influence over purchasing-decisions. There are "influencers" (with seemingly endless ranges of influence), "decision makers" (who we think pull the trigger) and an assortment of other shady characters, perhaps best described as "red herrings" for their ability to soak up time and energy with no positive influence on sales. The most extreme version of the latter group can be thought of as "black holes." By some measures, they account for 50 percent or more of sales costs.
If this weren't difficult enough, in many instances individuals misclassify themselves, or perhaps more accurately, they fail to understand the degree to which their own organizational dynamics puts them in one camp or another. Very few people would describe themselves as "red herrings," (if they do, well, that's another reason to keep your distance) although executives are often very candid about their own ability to influence outcomes, if asked--a tactic that too few sales people employ.
The quality of your Net Promoter program is a direct result of correctly classifying these customers, not to mention figuring out which type of customer wields the most influence. All Net Promoter scores are valuable, but understanding the value of scores from decision makers and influencers can ensure you get the right picture of your customers. A well-designed CEM or Net Promoter program will pay close attention to the different types of customer responses and ensure that the connections among influencers, decision makers and "red herrings" are clear.
This all might sound a bit theoretical, but it becomes eminently practical once you figure out how decisions get made within your customer base, then start using that insight to inform your account managers. You don't need to consider all the possible decision-making models, but at the very least you should develop a hypothesis that accomplishes the following:
- Identifies distinct types of customers and the roles that they play
- Determines the relative significance of people within each role--in particular, their impact on the decision-making process (both buying and renewing)
- Categorizes known customers into appropriate buckets (this requires some care, given the complexity of today's titles and organizational politics).
The quality of your results depends a great deal on the quality of your sales and marketing organizations. Putting the right names in the right boxes requires good account management at the local level (it might be worth offering an incentive to those who take the trouble to do this right).
Once you have successfully categorized these decision-makers, you need to devise systems and processes that reflect the reality of this complex situation and provide data in a form that truly supports the sales process. In the world of Customer Experience Management, this entails fixing two basically flawed principles: democracy among respondents and the invisibility of those who don't respond.
Let's fix democracy first.
A CEM solution would be great (and truly a predictor of success) if we could view customer feedback from a system that comprehends the role of each individual respondent in the business. How can we solve this problem in a practical manner? Given the complexity of the decision-making process, not to mention the difficulty of identifying these roles, this seems like an impossible task.
And yet many companies do solve this problem by applying segmentation to their CEM solutions. These astute firms go to great lengths to precisely segment their customer bases, and the rewards often justify the effort.
Looking for a simple concept to get started with? Track response rates by segments of respondents and focus on getting critical mass amongst decision makers. In other words, focus on driving high response rates amongst the sub-category of respondents that actually make the decisions. Better still, work to weed out red herrings from the respondent database--the sales force should be effective at identifying each subclass of respondent during the account planning process.
And as for finding those invisible users who don't respond--especially those despots who sign the checks with absolute authority--please tune into my next blog, The Case of the Missing Executive. In the interim, I'd love to hear your stories about bosses and despots, new and old--especially the ones who have had a measurable impact on sales.
