B2B Marketing – Creating Customer Value, Growth and Differentiation Through Agile Practices

He who delivers the greatest customer value wins. Agile practices help you focus on customer value.

Customer value must permeate everything the company does and must become the highest goal of the company. Unless you understand what creates value for your customers and what helps them create value for their customers you can’t deliver breakthrough – game changing value.

Leaders, the ones that stay on the top of the food chain, recognize that delivering growth, innovation, customer value rapidly has to be sustainable. Agile is an ongoing process which prioritize the things that create customer value and eliminates of the things that don’t. This approach when managed well, eliminates initiatives that create little or even negative marketing and sales ROI. The result is that the organization can invest its time sustainably in the projects that create real value.

 Getting started is fairly simple. Before deciding to do something, everyone across the organization should be asking and answering five simple questions:

• Will what we are proposing enable our customer to make a material difference in their customer’s ability to achieve financial and strategic goals.
• Will it help our customers increase the value, credibility and viability of their brand?
• Will it help our customers gain a significant competitive advantage.
• Will it help just a few of our customers or all of them?
• What can we do in the next four to six weeks to move this effort ahead and validate whether it will create real value for customers?

If you can instill those basic questions into the decisions the people in your company are making day in and day out, your ability to create breakthrough customer value without burning your teams out, will increase dramatically.

Mike Connor, Principal, Spice Catalyst