Winning with Customers: A Playbook for B2B

Chapter 6. Informing Decisions

This chapter is all about generating insights from the data that you have collected from customers to help you make better decisions.

Let's face it, at this point, you have spent time and resources engaging the customers and setting an expectation that you are going to act on what they told you. If you do not follow through, you will create a serious customer relationship problem. Even if you had a less than desirable situation with customers before preparing and conducting interviews, it will get even worse if you do not use their valuable input in your decision-making process and close the loop with the customer.

It is time to make decisions—customer-informed and data-driven decisions. Management has to decide what opportunities to pursue and what investments to make that will help customers make more money. And while there may be a tendency to resist the use of fact-based customer data to make decisions, capturing and analyzing customer data helps to keep the organization honest in its decision making.

Once you have made these decisions, the organization will have a portfolio of the best investment opportunities to win with customers. Successfully managing these opportunities becomes the priority of the organization and represents the drivers of profitable growth. This will set the organization on a course to create more value for customers, outmaneuver the competition, and grow profits.

There is also another important point to consider. As the organization ...