#20 – Win-loss analysis, Relationship research, Kittens, CX NPS Influencer article

 

Welcome to the 20th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Win some, lose some
  2. Relationship research and improvement is the NPS Group focus for June
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites, including when to use a photo of a kitten
  5. Looking forward

Win some, lose some

When HP and EDS merged, I was the HP-side business integration leader for EMEA. I quickly became exposed to EDS sales people who worked for a year or more on large outsourcing deals. Sometimes they won. Sometimes they lost. Naturally, it was devastating to a large team to work for such a long time, and for the effort to turn into nothing.

At the time, I was also the EMEA Chief of Staff and led what we called ‘Total Customer Experience & Quality.” I was naturally interested in why we won or lost such deals. Let me exaggerate to make my point. When I asked sales teams, we always won because of excellent relationships with various people in the customer’s organization. Strangely, they said we never lost because we did not have such relationships. We only ever lost because our prices were too high.

This kind of biased view made me even more interested in win-loss analysis. That is the background to the blog post I sent you two days ago.

Relationship research and improvement is the June NPS Group focus

Win-loss analysis is a subset of relationship research. Particularly in B2B, most companies have a sort of Pareto distribution of their customers, as shown in the example below. A relatively small number of customers provide a large proportion of their revenue. Understanding what these customers want and giving it to them is critical to growth and financial success. That is why I have decided to focus on relationship research in general, and the face-to-face interview process in particular, in the LinkedIn NPS Group here.

Our latest blog posts

The posts on the role of the customer experience leader or Chief Customer Officer have been very popular. This week’s post on business strategy has attracted comments on LinkedIn and elsewhere that come from a different audience than my usual one. Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Win-Loss analysis – Here is a method that works

One of your sales teams is celebrating! They just won a big deal they have been working on for the last four months. Another team has lost a similar deal and is not quite so happy. This article is about how to understand the reasons for success and failure, using a simple six-factor model.

image The starting point in any strategy: Situation Analysis

Whether in business, the military, government or indeed non-profit organizations, the the first step in generating a strategy is a comprehensive analysis of your current situation. Your destination and starting point are equally important. This article covers the six dimensions that should lead to powerful strategic insights. “You have to ask new questions to get new answers.”

image More thoughts on the role and team of the Chief Customer Officer or customer experience leader

Thank you for the feedback on my first post on how to think about the work of the Chief Customer Officer or customer experience leader. This week’s post concentrates on teams the leader should lead, as well as teams in which he or she should participate.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

CustomerGauge article: CX and NPS trends for 2020 – Influencers edition (includes me!)

I am honored to find myself on this list of “…some of world’s most influential CX & NPS thought leaders.” They asked 14 people what we thought would be the most important single technology or trend that would influence NPS and customer experience between now and 2020. There are at least ten different themes in the answers. I found many of the answers to be insightful, and hope you will feel the same. The article is here.

If you want people to read what you write… use a photo of a kitten

Brian O’Malley of Accel Partners wrote a LinkedIn article titled You’re not fooling anyone with that high Net Promoter Score. While the content is OK, it certainly does not merit the 3414 Likes and 191 comments it has received. I read the first 100 comments. Many are about the kitten in the photo at the top of the article. So, what can I say? People will at least open your article if you have a visible photo of a kitten. Here it is for kitten lovers everywhere.

Looking forward

I have started my search for all articles that study the relationship between NPS trends and market share trends. More soon. I have also started work on a project to establish the relationship between the Temkin Experience Ratings for US companies and employee satisfaction. It will be interesting to see whether it is the same as the relationship with the American Customer Satisfaction Index results.

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You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

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