Winning with Customers: A Playbook for B2B

Appendix A. Our Approach to Certification and Building Capability

We have both been ambassadors for operating a company with a healthy dose of outside-in customer knowledge. And we have done this for longer than either of us would like to admit. Time really flies. A couple of years ago, we ate our own dog food by conducting the Customer Value Creation (CVC) process on ourselves. The feedback we received was essentially this: We really love you guys and the work you have done, but you have got to find a way to make this our capability. We need tools that will allow us to build our own capabilities and scale this work throughout our organization.

Building Capability

After a bit of soul searching that probed our doubts about packaging everything we have ever learned into a set of tools, we embarked on what our customers suggested. Our journey over the past two years has led us to develop two products whose singular purpose is to allow companies to build their own CVC capability—to understand if their customers make more money doing business with them. The journey has gone well so far. Looking back, we wonder what took us so long to realize that the real objective should have always been to help companies to create this capability.

The two products we have created to assist organizations build their own CVC capabilities are referred to as Academy and Render®

Academy is a certification course composed of computer-based software learning and classroom instruction. We have taken everything ...