growth and the value of the services we provide.” When you engage executives in a relevant way, it not only gives you ongoing access, but they are actually enthusiastic supporters. Khorana added, “These are real executives with both business acumen and extensive domain knowledge. This combination has delivered an incredible level of thought, insight, and guidance.” Since launching their program, HCL hasn’t lost one of their “top 80” clients involved in these programs. These clients collectively represent more than $2 billion of the $3.3 billion in total sales.
So, if and when you do decide to move forward, you will quickly discover that this small group of executive customers has the power to consistently and successfully:
Drive alignment of your leadership team, and ultimately your entire organization with the market by developing a clear and focused strategy.
Leverage the time and effort of your leadership team, as well as company resources.
Deliver sustainable, predictable, profitable growth, which I will demonstrate is the true aim for any company.
I will also show how by rebalancing discretionary investments, your efforts will yield a measurable ROI on B2B specific initiatives. Imagine what that would do for your company—and your career.
I understand that this may sound like hyperbole, but I hope you’ll bear with me and read on. In the pages ahead, you will see how a wide variety of B2B companies have achieved all of these benefits. Their annual revenues range from under $50 million, such as at Intesource, Inc., a boutique provider of cutting-edge procurement services and solutions, to more than $40 billion, such as at Oracle, the broad-based enterprise computing giant. The highlighted companies hail from a wide variety of industries around the globe, including information technology, health care, publishing, broadcasting, banking, legal, and foodservice equipment, among others. Furthermore, their customers include a veritable Who’s Who of global business. I sought permission to include these real-life examples to prove not only are the three benefits attainable, but also that any kind of B2B company can attain them.
Coming Attractions
Before we begin, I’d like to give you an overview of the book’s contents.
Chapter 1: Setting the Stage is a brief introduction to the outcome that all B2B companies should be focused on and striving towards: sustainable, predictable, profitable growth (SPPG). As the acronym SPPG suggests, each of those words is equally important. In fact, if any one of them is missing, B2B success will be fleeting at best. It’s worth noting that SPPG is as important in the B2C sector as in the B2B sector. The difference between the two is how SPPG is achieved.
Chapter 2: A Different Game explores the primary differentiating factors between the B2B and B2C worlds. This chapter explains how three indisputable realities about customers define the B2B world and control the fate of the companies that operate within it.
Chapter 3: Six Benefits, Four Steps explores the core benefits of engaging your company’s executive customers. It also introduces the four steps in The B2B Executive Playbook which can generate SPPG. Each of the steps is detailed in the four chapters that follow.
Chapter 4: Engage describes the first step on the path to SPPG. It explains how to assemble and connect your company with a market collective—that is, a select group of the key executive customers in your market. This chapter discusses how to leverage executive customers to gain a view of their industries and key markets through their eyes, as well as how to work with them to brainstorm and validate new ideas. This level of engagement increases their loyalty to your company, as opposed to the people in your company with whom they usually work.
Chapter 5: Plan describes how the market collective can build consensus among the members of your leadership team and help ensure that your strategy is properly aligned to the needs and direction of the market. It shows how the engagement of executive customers adds direction, clarity, and confidence to the strategic planning process. This chapter also reveals how your leadership team can raise the effectiveness of its M&A deals, boost new product success, rethink business models, and develop more powerful marketing, service, and sales programs.
Chapter 6: Collaborate examines how to use individual executive customer relationships to unleash innovation and build your business. It shows how leading B2B companies are driving innovation by collaborating and co-designing the next generation of offerings with executive customers. Executive customers are the most reliable sources of input throughout all the phases of the development process, including ideation, validation, testing, and adoption. They not only assure the success of new products and services by ensuring they are properly aligned with the market, they are also the best and most enthusiastic customers for these solutions.
Chapter 7: Grow unveils the final step on the path to SPPG. It shows how executive customers can become your best marketers and salespeople. This chapter describes a variety of ways in which they can act as powerful advocates to accelerate your sales cycle, enhance your margins, and build your corporate reputation, brand equity, or reposition your firm.
Chapter 8: Implementing the Playbook and Chapter 9: Avoiding the Four Pitfalls contain hard-won knowledge from the companies who have adopted and implemented executive customer programs. Chapter 8 describes what companies can expect as they implement executive customer programs and the roles that various members of the B2B leadership team should play to ensure success. Chapter 9 describes the most common implementation pitfalls, in the hope that they can be avoided in the future.
Your Success Starts Here
Executive customer programs are powerful strategic tools with applications that range far beyond sales and marketing. When they are sponsored and supported by the entire leadership team, they can transform the performance of B2B companies, enabling them to operate more effectively in the short-term, and more importantly, grow and profit in the long-term. Executive customer programs can drive internal and market alignment, unleash successful innovation, and differentiate you from your competitors. They leverage executive time and resources, allowing company leaders to address strategic issues and avoid getting caught up in company politics, day-to-day problems, and tactical activities. Finally, executive customer programs can help you generate sustainable, predictable, profitable growth—which, in the end, is the only metric that really matters in corporate and career success.
CHAPTER 1
SETTING THE STAGE
ACTIVATING THE B2B ULTIMATE WEAPON TO CAPTURE SUSTAINABLE, PREDICTABLE, PROFITABLE GROWTH
Of the most admired publicly held companies in the world, only an elite few merit the coveted title “Wall Street darling.” These are the companies whose leaders have shepherded them to extraordinary runs of success, and whose corresponding stock price climbs quarter after quarter, year after year. Jack Welch and General Electric had such a run from 1981 to 2001, and its stock price rose from $1.50 to $40 on an adjusted basis. So did Larry Ellison and Oracle. From 1990 to 2011, Oracle’s stock price rose from 25 cents to $33. Mark Hurd led similar runs at NCR from 2002 to 2005, where the stock price rose from $9 to $39, and then again at Hewlett-Packard from 2005 to 2010, where the stock rose from $28 to $46.
To become rock stars of commerce, these leaders put into action a formula that achieved sustainable, predictable, profitable growth (SPPG), the four words that describe the Holy Grail of business. Their companies were valued accordingly by the financial markets, and their careers took off.
For most executives, however, achieving SPPG is as elusive as the Grail itself. How close—or how far—they come to leading their organization to SPPG determines their true personal performance and legacy. How do you determine where you are on this trajectory? Take a look inside your organization at the SPPG leading indicators:
What does the company’s top and bottom line performance look like? Are both revenue and profits rising?
What about balance sheet valuation, cash flow, and shareholder/owner equity?
If your company does not have positive measurements in all of these consistently over time, it is highly likely there are flaws in your strategic playbook.
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