B2B Customer Centric in 3 steps
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 6:26 am
The great Theodore Levitt already talked about B2B Customer Centric more than twenty years ago in his inspiring book “Marketing Myopia” . He explained to us with clear examples that consumers do not buy screws or drills, they buy a picture hanging on the wall or, in other words, the product alone does not solve what the consumer is looking to solve, it is simply the means to do so but it is not everything, even in B2B.
Years later, Clayton M. Christensen went netherlands phone number library further and tried to explain, with his famous example of milkshakes, consumer behavior with his famous methodology “ Jobs to be done” which basically dealt with the same thing that Levitt had already said years before: “let’s think more about what the customer wants and looks for than about what we do”. Few value propositions that claim to be B2B Customer-centric are built without his famous canvas.
Today we are already seeing how products are becoming commoditized worldwide and how finding common patterns in consumers is no longer so easy. The “B2B Customer-Centric” era is born, one that aims, through experiences, to put the customer at the detonating center of any business culture and strategy.
In the B2B world this is vital, to survive in a world where the future happened two weeks ago, as Seth Godin rightly says, there is no choice but to understand the changes in the desires and expectations of the client that I have chosen to understand first and to help second. A B2B client normally buys to transform or to distribute directly, therefore everything that one can contribute to him on that path in addition to your product or service will be vital for him and he will probably end up calling it “experience”. At BtrueB we go further and even work on the hypothesis of several experiences at once, one for each positioning.
So within a B2B Customer-Centric framework, what should I pursue to help my customer with experiences instead of interrupting them by selling them products? From my humble experience, 3 things.
Years later, Clayton M. Christensen went netherlands phone number library further and tried to explain, with his famous example of milkshakes, consumer behavior with his famous methodology “ Jobs to be done” which basically dealt with the same thing that Levitt had already said years before: “let’s think more about what the customer wants and looks for than about what we do”. Few value propositions that claim to be B2B Customer-centric are built without his famous canvas.
Today we are already seeing how products are becoming commoditized worldwide and how finding common patterns in consumers is no longer so easy. The “B2B Customer-Centric” era is born, one that aims, through experiences, to put the customer at the detonating center of any business culture and strategy.
In the B2B world this is vital, to survive in a world where the future happened two weeks ago, as Seth Godin rightly says, there is no choice but to understand the changes in the desires and expectations of the client that I have chosen to understand first and to help second. A B2B client normally buys to transform or to distribute directly, therefore everything that one can contribute to him on that path in addition to your product or service will be vital for him and he will probably end up calling it “experience”. At BtrueB we go further and even work on the hypothesis of several experiences at once, one for each positioning.
So within a B2B Customer-Centric framework, what should I pursue to help my customer with experiences instead of interrupting them by selling them products? From my humble experience, 3 things.