Driving Customer Growth Seminar

Dr. Fred Wiersema
Founder and President
Customer Strategy Group LLC

This program is not currently scheduled.

This action-packed workshop was expressly designed to involve participants in a high-impact learning experience. It will at once challenge and reinforce, cajole and energize business marketers to tackle customer growth opportunities with a reinvigorated perspective, fresh approaches and renewed resolve.

Few issues rank as high on B-to-B executives' agendas today as the quest for profitable customer growth. Few issues are more pivotal for their companies' sustained success. Yet, to quote GE's CEO Jeff Immelt, "the toughest thing that any company has to get today is an order." No wonder that astute business marketers are searching for different ways to sharpen their customer appeal. Increasingly, they:

• Dissect their customers' and end-users' experiences to discern better ways to deliver value
• Re-prime their innovation engines in pursuit of new products and breakthroughs
• Tap sophisticated CRM systems to get a better handle on the effectiveness of their customer-facing processes
• Try out promising approaches and new techniques to stimulate buyer interest, some of which are working better than others

So, it is not that companies aren't trying, or are lacking prescriptions. If anything, the reverse is true: it is common for businesses to get saturated with well-intended initiatives that unduly fragment management's time and resources. As a result, many projects just don't sustain their momentum or fall well short of expectations.

Determined leaders find a way out of this quandary: they sharply concentrate their efforts on a few well-chosen, high-potential priorities. Their example invariably leads others to pose questions such as, how does one pick the most promising opportunities to pursue , and what can we do to build traction for our focused growth initiatives, both with selected customers and within our own organization. Those are the questions at the heart of this workshop.

Click here to view a short Brainshark presentation from Dr. Wiersema.

Workshop Overview

Driving Customer Growth in B-to-B is an action-learning program that will help executive participants assess and calibrate their company's customer development approaches, and to identify promising avenues to bolster their leadership stance.

The workshop begins by building a powerful case for customer growth. That is followed by an exploration of the factors that hold back a firm's efforts to achieve profitable growth. Specifically, drawing on extensive research by workshop leader and noted business strategist Dr. Fred Wiersema, we will examine what companies can do to create the right conditions for growth and overcome four major impediments :

1. Growth initiatives that are too diffuse in scope or that under-leverage a company's innate strengths.
2. A less-than-commanding knowledge of the evolving requirements of target customers' requirements, and of what, exactly, 'superior value' means to them.
3. An insufficient understanding of the hard and soft factors that drive customers' buying processes. This is of particular concern in the case of new products, extended solutions, and in non-routine purchase decisions.
4. A lack of broad organizational buy-in and support for customer-focused initiatives, especially in technology-driven or operations-focused firms.

We will be sorting through a variety of approaches and insights to deal with each of these impediments, learning from successful companies as well as less-than-stellar examples. Breakout group exercises and case discussions will allow a deeper drill into a number of concrete problem situations. Participants are also strongly encouraged to share situations they faced themselves with the class.

Throughout the program, participants are urged to keep a record of specific actions they could consider taking in their own firms to put these learnings into practice.

Workshop Objectives

This intensive program aims to build solid competencies that help B-to-B marketers lead and energize their firms' customer growth efforts:

• A customer-growth mindset : Develop a keen sense for and appreciation of the pivotal factors that successful business leaders exploit to strengthen their strategic customer base, and to stay clear of growth-slowing impediments.
• A deepened grasp of what B-to-B customers value and how they choose their suppliers : Equip participants with a practical set of approaches and tools to help them put the workshop's concepts to productive use in their own companies.
• Self-assessment : Help business marketers size up their own situation and prioritize the most promising directions for further action.
• Execution prowess : Sharpen participants' awareness of implementation obstacles and how to overcome them, while focusing them on effectively enlisting the broader organization in the quest for customer growth.

Who Should Attend

Driving Customer Growth in B-to-B is for hands-on marketing, sales and business leaders in industrial and technology companies and business service firms who are looking for an invigorating experience to hone and elevate their leadership skills.

Workshop Content

The workshop is divided into four segments that follow a logical step-by-step progression to facilitate competence-building. Each segment draws on lectures, group exercises or cases, and extensive interaction and discussion.

Seminar Outline

1. Sizing Up Your Growth Challenge and Determining Your "Sweet Spot"
• Building a compelling case for customer growth
• Why growth is so hard to come by
• Exercise: "The Dreaded Account Review"
• Techniques to find your "sweet spot" and sort out priorities
2. Understanding What Customers Want: Tapping Into Their Stated and Unstated Needs
• What's really going on in today's B-to-B buying organizations
• Exploring both customers' own success requirements and their end-users' needs
• Implications for sales, marketing and other functions
• Exercise: "The Churn Top-10"
• Approaches to deepen your grasp of customer needs and detect better ways to help them succeed
3. Motivating Customers to Grow Their Business With You: Getting Them to Embrace Innovation
• Diagnosing customers' and end-users' decision drivers and their adoption processes for new products and innovative solutions
• Case: "The Breakthrough That Didn't"
• Strategies and tactics to build customer intimacy and solidify your preferred supplier status
4. Creating Organizational Buy-in and Traction
• Case discussion: "The 'Better Solutions' Champion"
• Getting your business aligned around the customer's scorecard
• Organizational realities and effective ways to gain leverage
• The power of sharing success stories and learning from mishaps

Format

The two-day seminar meets from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. each day. All materials are provided.

Instructor

Dr. Fred Wiersema is a noted business strategist, best-selling author, and management educator whose engaging style and incisive insights have resonated powerfully with executives around the world.

He is best known for his influential work on the winning strategies of market leading companies. For more than 25 years, he has inspired and mobilized business leaders in their quest for profitable customer growth. Most of his explorations involve industrial firms and technology-intensive businesses, focusing on issues such as evolving supplier-buyer dynamics, strategic account growth, and B-to-B leadership development.

His books have sold over a million copies in 17 languages and include the #1 ranked Discipline of Market Leaders and its sequel, Customer Intimacy. His most recent work, The New Market Leaders: Who Is Winning and How in the Battle for Customers, was named "Best Business Book of the Year" in his native country Holland. Fred's doctorate is from the Harvard Business School. He is a long-time resident of the Boston area.

For more information contact:

Paula Dorminy or Gary Holler
Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM)
Smeal College of Business
The Pennsylvania State University
484 Business Building
University Park PA 16802-3603

Phone: 814-863-2782
Fax: 814-863-0413
E-mail: isbm@psu.edu