Customer Relationship Management

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Customer Relationship Management
By Kevin Temple, President of .

Relationship Management is not about a piece of software. In today's economy, it's about recapturing why your customers decided on your solution in the first place.

Ask yourself a few questions: Do you find yourself in a position of justifying your role in your customer's business? Are the "champions" who originally decided on your solution no longer in those positions?

At ValueVision Associates, we suggest taking a proactive approach and initiating a Relationship Management (RM) meeting with your customer. A great time to do this is at the beginning of the year.

The structure is as follows:

As pre-work prior to the RM meeting, interview the stakeholders from the customer organization and your own team members to capture why this customer decided on your solution in the first place. Specifically:
Identify the unresolved business issue or challenge at the time. Examples are cost management, time to market, and competitive pressures.
Identify the underlying people, process or technology problems impeding the business. Examples include, lack of staff, expertise, iterations in operations, or simply an additional step that is not supported by the previous solution.
Identify the solutions that your company used to resolve the problems and address the business issue.
Identify the value that was accrued as a result of your solutions. (hint: quantify the impact of the problems and the business issue)
During your RM meeting, review this information and seek confirmation or changes to the picture. This will ensure that they have the same picture that you do.
Use the same topic format (Business Issue, Problems, Solutions, and Value) to mutually create an update of the customer's current situation. This step can uncover new opportunities for your company and develop your future value.
Confirm that the customer stakeholders felt that the meeting was worthwhile, and if so, request a regular review of this information. Annually, bi-annually, or quarterly.

Last item: be sure to balance the customer representatives in the meeting. Not too heavy on the end user or technical staff, or your meeting will certainly get dragged down.

Kevin Temple is cofounder and president of , creators of the Value Selling framework. Prior to ValueVision Associates, Mr. Temple was Vice President of Sales for Cadence Design Systems, the world�s largest electronic design automation supplier. While at Cadence, Mr. Temple re-engineered the sales organization to move from product feature/function selling to high-level business impact selling using the Value Selling framework, which is now provided by ValueVision Associates. The results were outstanding -- revenue growth jumped from 6% to 38% annually, discounting dropped by 38%, and the breadth of products included in every sale increased dramatically. During his tenure at Cadence, sales increased from $48 million to over $700 million per year.

Prior to working at Cadence, his experience also includes sales and sales management responsibilities at Valid Logic, a key competitor of Cadence and eventual merger partner; Analog Design Tools, a successful start-up company focused on a subset of electronic design challenges; and Control Data, the forerunner in supercomputing technology.

As a consultant, speaker and writer, Mr. Temple travels around the world to retool medium-to-large sales organizations with the Value Selling sales process. He combines his experience and knowledge with a fast wit, comical characterizations and practical applications to motivate and educate sales and marketing organizations.