10 Ways To Get Engaged With Customers

In any relationship, engagement is the pivotal piece, as we know. It remains equally vital when we talk about your engagement with channel partners or end-users. While new partner acquisition is important, the existing partner retention is equally important for you. Because, the existing partners / end-users should continue to get improved value, which needs nurturing. And, here comes the importance of engagement.

 

Let's pick up a scenario: Say, we need to develop a regional engagement program for a 5-nation region. Couple of countries need communications in local language, while other 3 countries are comfortable with English. Among 7 variants (country-specific), here we considered just 1 varint, which is "language". Let's see how do we map program-dedicated resources (by country) in the matrix-1 below: 

 

While doing that, we notice that we don't have in-country resources dedicated for this program who can communicate in the local language. To partially cover up that gap, we may be able to borrow some in-country resources for limited time for some very specific events, as we understood from the country manager of those 2 language-sensitive countries.

 

 

 

 

Now, let's develop a suitable matrix-2 (see below) which maps engagement communication platforms, resource-mix and countries: 

 

In this matrix-2, you will notice there are 10 different communication platforms, which starts with "Phone Calls" through "Webinars" to "Face-to-Face" engagements. Country-by-country the dedicated resource-mixes and the communication platforms are mapped.

You might have noticed that those 3 English-speaking countries avail the values of all the 10 engagement platforms. However, for the other 2 countries (where local language communication is essentially needed) the program cannot provide "phone calls" as one of the engagement communication platforms. When we talk about the "phone calls", we basically mean that a local language-speaking resources (with desired accent & fluency) are needed to address the inbound phone calls for 8 hours a day for 5 working days / week, as the minimum. 

 

As we indicated earlier, language is just 1 of the 7 variants when you start developing a regional engagement program of such nature. Multiple scenario's will get evolved to address needs adequately.

 

Consult2Win helps client to develop and execute engagement strategies for one or multiple countries or multiple regions for products or services. Should you need any support, you may contact us. 

You can please leave your comments at the bottom for us to improve further.

 

To know more on the following topics, please view these blog posts:

1.  10 Things You Must Focus while Profiling Partners: http://consult2win.blogspot.com/2013/02/10-things-you-must-focus-while.html 

2. 2 Compelling Values to explore Business Intelligence (BI): http://consult2win.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-

3.  3 Major Steps In The Solution Business: http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-

4. Product Portfolio Management (PPM): http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00:00:00-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 Things You Must Focus while Profiling Partners

Profiling is becoming more and more important to intensify segment-specific services. Partner Segmentation has been in the horizon for quite some time now. However, to execute partner segmentation, one of the major pieces is profiling, as we know. Knowing your partners' needs, preferences, inclinations, pain points, capabilities and the likes, therefore, became very important for all the product marketers & service providers who take their products / services to the end-user through their channel partners.

 

While every efforts are put in by you (to know partners better, deeper & clearer), some gaps or missing piece/s may remain. Here are those 10 things you must focus while profiling your channel partners. Effective profiling helps enterprises to translate the output to develop tiering strategies. The tiering depends on multiple factors like enterprise' objectives, partner profile map, breadth & depth of offerings etc. Product Potfolio Management (http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/) is one of the important pieces that drives the partner profiling architecture.  Consult2Win helps their clients to develop the customised profiling architecture and design the purpose-specific tiering framework.   

2 Compelling Values to explore Business Intelligence (BI)

The term business intelligence is now-a-days heard more frequently than even 2-3 years back. Lot of companies are getting interested in understanding, planning and executing some sort of a BI strategy to keep them aligned with the trend or to move ahead of their competitors.

Why this rush and what values BI brings to an enterprise, remains a question in the minds of many who might not have got the opportunity to get exposed to BI that much.

As I view it, at a macro level BI brings couple of distinct values to an organization by way of “speed” and “quality” of decision making.

1.      Speed of Decision-Making: In today’s world, speed is a competitive advantage. If we delay in grabbing an opportunity, somebody else will grab it. That opportunity can be from any functional domain. Like, it can be a business opportunity. One of the areas to focus here could be lead-to-opportunity pipeline by way of a more rugged CRM or sales force automation, which can help us getting the field pulse. A BI tool can leverage the CRM to make an analytics platform to provide the desired inputs for faster decision making by way of other strategies in terms of deal or pricing or account-mapping or the likes. It gives us an advantage if can act faster than the competition. That opportunity can be from other functions as well, like supply chain or product development. BI can help them all.  That’s a clear value comes out of BI.          

2.      Quality of Decision: For anyone to make a quality decision, he needs certain inputs. The more complete and objective those inputs are, better the quality of decision, as we know. Let’s consider that to take a decision, we need 5 inputs. If only 2 inputs are available while taking the decision, which cannot be deferred, what do we do generally? We do our best to make an intelligent guess and assume something (based on intuition or gut-feel) for those 3 missing inputs. And, we take the decision. If BI can provide those 3 missing inputs accurately & quickly, the quality of that decision could have been far better. That’s the value of having BI.     

BI starts with capturing facts, storing them in the form of data, analysing them (dicing / slicing, relating etc.), and providing access to data to help enterprise-users make informed business decisions. BI applications include the activities of DSS (Decision Support Systems), Query, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Analysis, Forecasting and Reporting. Data Mining is definitely a part of it, though. Accurate (higher data quality) & current (latest / most updated) data are the pivotal points for making a BI work effectively. And, then only the business decision can truly be called as “informed decision” in every sense of the word.

A comprehensive BI, therefore, can help an enterprise making high quality decision @ high speed.

[The author was Director – Business Intelligence of a US Multinational Organisation (operating in the ICT space) for 3 years covering Asia Region as one of the early-adopters way back in 2008]

You can follow me on twitter: @samikar

Contacts

Mr. Sami Kar
Pioneer Street
Mandaluyong City, Philippines
M + 63 (0) 926 697 8969
E  sami_kar2004@yahoo.com

Consult2Win-1 (Upturn)

As we all know, it was a difficult time that the economy underwent in most of the countries in the world, barring few, though. In the current post-recession period, an organization needs to be ready to grab the opportunities arising out of the upturn. Growing revenues & profitability may therefore be the common objectives of most of the organizations. The challenge is to assess the current contextual landscape and envision the emerging / future trends before we initiate the growth strategy formulation process. While we design the financial value levers to give you the Growth of Top & Bottom lines, Working Capital & RoC, we should also think of some of the non-financial aspects of your organization to gradually develop a Balanced Score Card (BSC). This may call for making some changes in how we do business and may lead to Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) / Business Process Management (BPM). Re-visiting the business process and making a paradigm shift direct towards change management across the organization or the impacted functions.

Over & above, Vision-Mission-Value Credo, one of the starting points of BPR could be Voice of Customer (VoC) to become more customer-centric or to improve market participation further through better customer satisfaction / delight / loyalty. Market Research organizations help us to get our existing & prospective customers surveyed to start re-analyzing our SWOT to possibly redefine the go-to-market path &/or market attack plan. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps us with appropriate Contacts & Accounts, which serve as the basic inputs to any customer survey. Clear action items come out to move forward with multiple & simultaneous improvement programs.

For many organizations Product/s is/are the core to the business. New Product Development Process (NPDP) is therefore very important & pivotal to such organizations. One of the starting points of NPDP is VoC, which other inputs comprises of Break-Through Idea (BTI). For new-to-earth (NTE) products possibly VoC will have much lower weightage than BTI. The outcome of the NPDP needs to be High Value-Added Solution (HVAS) to solve customers' problem better than our peers (http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/2012/05/3-major-steps-in-solution-business.html). Value creation and time-to-market are the keys to NPDP to aptly position the product in the market place to gradually become peerless.

Once all these are done well, customer acquisition becomes the focus, as we know. Account & Business Development are the couple of areas where the organization may need to focus, after the valued decision is taken as to which vertical or which top X verticals to address, to start with. Business & Market Intelligence helps us to sharpen our focus areas to have faster return. There are some good business Intelligence tools available in the market which helps the senior & top management to take appropriate & faster decision making.

Price, for a non-commoditized product, has nothing to do with the product cost in a market-driven environment or for a HVAS, if it’s not a NTE. Price is a function of value that we deliver to solve customers' problems. A bottle of water may cost as high as US$ 10 or more in the middle of a desert for an utterly thirsty guy under the scorching sun. Pricing tools are available which can be a part of the pricing process to dice & slice data for desired analysis & decision-making.

To achieve all these, as we all know, we need a good, committed & talented team, which is a product of good Human Resource (HR) Management process & enabling organizational environment. HR Tools, Training organizations and the likes are available in the world to help us achieving what we like to do. The organizational environment needs to be encouraging, empowering & respectful to allow individuals & teams to excel in everything that they do. 

Please visit this link for "Product Portfolio Management (PPM)": http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/
You may also visit "3 Major Steps In The Solution Business": http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/2012/05/3-major-steps-in-solution-business.html
Another interesting blog post for you is: http://consult2win.blogspot.com/

You can follow me on twitter: @samikar