Is your company acquiring the necessary skills for 'Customer Intimacy'?

Leaders can and must lead, but employees from all ranks of a company - from the back office and the front - must participate in the shift to CUSTOMER INTIMACY. A team spirit, and a sense of shared GOALS, must light up a company's efforts at intimacy. Teams of people working together create more excitement, more energy, more ideas, and more enthusiasm than individuals ever can.

Try to imagine your own company. Think about your current position in the marketplace and your prospects for the future. What are your aspirations, your hopes, and your dreams? 

Customer Intimacy offers tailored solutions to its customers. Together, the salesperson and customer sit together to commit to a shared goal.  Photo courtesy: Unsplash

Lessons from the BEST Selling Companies and Brands, who specifically focus on one of the key "Value Disciplines", which is "Customer Intimacy".

How to get there?

The future is largely uncertain and unexplored; and the capacity to act, rather than to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure of leadership.

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, 

Authors of The Core Competence of the Corporations

Do you know your strengths, and do you know the area of expertise that will put you on the right path? Successful customer-intimate companies have initiated the transition with tactics that fall into one of the three (3) categories.

• -Revamping a CORE process: Redesign a key process that affects how customers use your products and services. It doesn't necessarily involve a major shift in technology, product development, or customer selectivity -although those might come later.

• -Changing your measurements and REWARDS systems. Incentive programs for employees, sales quotas, and performance-related bonuses can be invaluable tools for keeping a company jogging along at the top speed.

• -Exercising CUSTOMER SELECTIVITY for many companies, the first step in becoming closer to important customers is phasing out burdensome relationships.
  

In contrast, according to what Hamel and Prahalad say many senior managers do not, as many successful leaders do, place imagining the future and building the company's competencies at the top of the to-do list. 

As always in management problems, invest for the future and focus your company's resources on its operational strengths.

- Book 'Managing to Survive, by John Harvey-Jones.

Builders of visionary companies tend to concentrate primarily on building an organization. Instead of concentrating on acquiring the individual personality traits of visionary leaders, they take an architectural approach and concentrate on building the organisational TRAITS of visionary companies. Their primary focus is not on the tangible implementation of a great idea, the expression of a charismatic personality, the gratification of their ego, or the accumulation of personal wealth. Their greatest creation is the COMPANY itself and WHAT IT STANDS FOR.

Customer Intimacy: What is it?

Are customer-intimate companies merely babysitting their customers? Rather than simply reacting to their customers' every whim, customer-intimate companies' suppliers discover how to provide complete solutions to customers' needs. In doing so, they become indispensable partners. They take a major stake in their customers' ultimate successes. They develop a NEW MINDSET-a new way of doing business. 

It's possible for a company to begin the initial step of becoming customer intimate by focusing on only one or very few important customers at a time. 

Ask these questions.

What services are needed to bring about solutions? 

How should our products be customized?

In answering these and other questions for one chosen customer, you will learn many of the competencies needed for intimacy- and moves to the next customer. Thus, a company acquires the necessary skills through measured accretion to become fully customer intimate.

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