Who’s your customer?
To identify your customer try this experiment. Ask your service technicians and phone support agents to tell you who is their customer at a few of your largest accounts. Then ask the same question to the salespeople who sold and service these same accounts. While there will be some overlap, many names will be mentioned by only one group.
Interesting, but why is it important? In September 2018, I wrote a post called “The Criticality Of Knowing Your Customer’s Desired Business Outcomes.” It is still a valuable post about mapping your services into people’s past and future pain or pleasure and how the recipients feel about each. However, I did not explain who the customer(s) is, so the reader may be uncertain about what to offer each person they interact with. This post will clear up that oversight.
Difference between B2C and B2B
This discussion highlights one area where B2C and B2B are different. Use the following graphic as a guide:
In the B2C space, the ultimate customer is called the “consumer.” All the intermediate buyers are called customers. In the top example, Jiffy made a jar of peanut butter and sold it to the customer – the wholesaler. In the supply chain, the last customer is my wife – she paid the retailer, brought the product home, and put it away in the kitchen cabinet.
Consequently, I was the first consumer. Eventually, my wife also became a consumer. In this example, everyone in the supply chain except the manufacturer and the consumer paid for the item and resold it at a profit.
The story is very different in the B2B space, with services and complex products. As we see in the lower graphic, the manufacturer sells directly to the buying company. The buyer is usually a buying committee, like that shown in the photo at the top of this article. The committee consists of representatives from the end using department, the purchasing organization, someone from finance, and representatives from most of the other interested departments.
Once the P.O. is placed and the product delivered, the person with the most at stake and the most to gain is the end user.
In the semiconductor processing world, the end user is called the tool owner! But she is not alone. If there are problems with the equipment, she has the maintenance department to fall back on. And if the situation gets grave, she can always escalate to purchasing, who has significant clout with the manufacturer because of future purchases.
Who’s your customer?
Unfortunately, the only correct answer is “It depends.” It depends on your responsibilities, your role in your company, and what is going on with the customer. Here are the “customers” for various players, listed in priority order, for routine business transactions:
When it is time to renew a contract, whom would your contract seller call? Again, it depends. In many companies, the decision maker is the person with the budget who relies on the end user’s advice. In other companies, the end user decides with the agreement of the budget holder. And organizations with a robust central maintenance organization, it usually makes the buying decision. No matter where the contract seller starts, they will eventually be directed to the decision maker. So the seller should update the CRM system so that future contacts are with the correct person.
The key to selling service contracts
If the service organization is responsible for selling contracts after the initial sale, they need three pieces of information:
- Who’s the customer they should contact?
- What is their motivation to buy?
- What should they offer?
If the sellers do their homework and prepare for the call, they are very likely to get the order as long as the buyer achieved the outcomes they expected during the proceeding year. If there had been difficulties, the seller has to bring up the situation, articulate what the company did to resolve the issue, and show how the relationship had moved beyond the stress that developed up to when the issue was resolved in the buyer’s favor. This requires some effort, but today no worthwhile job is stress-free.
Good selling!
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization understand who’s your customers, please get in touch with us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.
Image by rawpixel from Pixabay