Diagnostics and Strategy: getting from Here to There

Going from Here to There: using Diagnostics, Facilitation, and Coaching to lay out your roadmap.

As I walked in this morning, I saw a large horse fly resting on the sidewalk. Huge, not particularly attractive: it couldn’t possibly fly. When She (sic!) created flying creatures, people asked what God had been thinking to design the horse fly or the bumblebee. After all we know that God has a grand design and all creation fits into the plan according to Her design. In truth, however, God’s design of bumblebees and horse flies has come under question for centuries. As in: what was She thinking? Or, nothing designed that way can fly. Yet, we know that both creatures do fly and do so well. What works so easily for God does not work as well for humans when it comes to successful planning on how to get to there from here.

Getting from here-to-there is always on everybody’s minds; and, getting from here-to- there is always already a clearly visible destination. Truth is, however: often we get lost on the way. [And, no! I really do not just mean driving directions]. I’m thinking more along the lines of the transformation the US now faces as the Tea Party tries to hold the nation hostage and take its citizens back to the 1787-9 period; or, a lot more simple to solve, how to transform a business into a customer-centered, customer-based business.
The challenges are so immense as to risk hyperbole. The missteps made happen so frequently and predictably that there must be a better way.

We no longer can afford missteps in today’s hyper-competitive, always-on, flat world. No, what we need is a way to assure breakthrough performance and to assure creation of a roadmap that outlines our best chance to arrive at the destination, the desired end-state.
And it really is quite simple to effect best-planning and execution of these crucial transformations. The keys are diagnostics, facilitation, and coaching.

Plans, lucid, readable and comprehensible roadmaps are important, nay vital to success: whether it is a “simple” exercise, such as taking your family of 5 to [you fill-in-the-blanks] for a mini-summer vacation, or (more) complex such as planning for your 24 year old daughter’s dream wedding, or compound-complex as in establishing your firm’s new customer centered and customer focused strategy. (Thinking of plans as a type of sentence construction may be a helpful metaphor).

Distractions, unanticipated events, setbacks, life: all these “things” happen and so our best laid plans somehow end up producing horse flies rather than hummingbirds. Problem is our horse flies don’t fly. Our “success” at planning, unfortunately, does not translate into successful implementation and operational effectiveness.

And, so what?! What now? How can your B2B CRM & CEM strategy be implemented successfully, without a hitch? How do we plan for life to happen and keep on the path. As I began to write this paragraph these 2 phrases surfaced: “Seek first to understand.” “Start with the end in mind.” And, yes, both pieces of advice are apropos of this discussion. Do they give a way to find planning and implementation success? I think they do. And, I think they do because they un-conceal what has been hidden or that which may distract.

What is needed is diagnostics, facilitation, and coaching. The process will clearly define 3 critical areas: 1. Where you are starting from: the point of departure or your “Current State”; 2., Where you intend to end up: your destination or “Desired End-State”; and, 3., the stuff that has to be done, accomplished, solved, etc. so that you can, in fact, get from here to there: “the bridging tasks”.

Unterwegs zu…

Unterwegs zur: Diagnostics, Facilitation, and Coaching for the B2B CRM & CEM Strategists

On the way to ....
As I walked in this morning, I saw a large horse fly resting on the sidewalk. Huge, not particularly attractive: it couldn’t possibly fly. When She (sic!) created flying creatures, people asked what God had been thinking to design the horse fly or the bumblebee. After all we know that God has a grand design and all creation fits into the plan according to Her design. In truth, however, God’s design of bumblebees and horse flies has come under question for centuries. As in: what was She thinking? Or, nothing designed that way can fly. Yet, we know that both creatures do fly and do so well. What works so easily for God does not work as well for humans when it comes to successful planning on how to get to there from here.

Getting from here-to-there is always on everybody’s minds; and, getting from here-to- there is always already a clearly visible destination. Truth is, however: often we get lost on the way. [And, no! I really do not just mean driving directions]. I’m thinking more along the lines of the transformation the US now faces as the Tea Party tries to hold the nation hostage and take its citizens back to the 1787-9 period; or, a lot more simple to solve, how to transform a business into a customer-centered, customer-based business.
The challenges are so immense as to risk hyperbole. The missteps made happen so frequently and predictably that there must be a better way.

We no longer can afford missteps in today’s hyper-competitive, always-on, flat world. No, what we need is a way to assure breakthrough performance and to assure creation of a roadmap that outlines our best chance to arrive at the destination, the desired end-state.
And it really is quite simple to effect best-planning and execution of these crucial transformations. The keys are diagnostics, facilitation, and coaching.

Plans, lucid, readable and comprehensible roadmaps are important, nay vital to success: whether it is a “simple” exercise, such as taking your family of 5 to [you fill-in-the-blanks] for a mini-summer vacation, or (more) complex such as planning for your 24 year old daughter’s dream wedding, or compound-complex as in establishing your firm’s new customer centered and customer focused strategy. (Thinking of plans as a type of sentence construction may be a helpful metaphor).

Distractions, unanticipated events, setbacks, life: all these “things” happen and so our best laid plans somehow end up producing horse flies rather than hummingbirds. Problem is our horse flies don’t fly. Our “success” at planning, unfortunately, does not translate into successful implementation and operational effectiveness.

And, so what?! What now? How can your B2B CRM & CEM strategy be implemented successfully, without a hitch? How do we plan for life to happen and keep on the path. As I began to write this paragraph these 2 phrases surfaced: “Seek first to understand.” “Start with the end in mind.” And, yes, both pieces of advice are apropos of this discussion. Do they give a way to find planning and implementation success? I think they do. And, I think they do because they un-conceal what has been hidden or that which may distract.

What is needed is diagnostics, facilitation, and coaching. The process will clearly define 3 critical areas: 1. Where you are starting from: the point of departure or your “Current State”; 2., Where you intend to end up: your destination or “Desired End-State”; and, 3., the stuff that has to be done, accomplished, solved, etc. so that you can, in fact, get from here to there: “the bridging tasks”.

Unterwegs zur…

Resource Allocation for the B2B CRM Practitioner

It’s no longer a secret. The evidence is compelling. It is well documented, both at the academic level and in practice. Enterprise-wide Customer Relationship Management (CRM and CEM) – when properly implemented - can achieve impressive results. The primary results:
• Increased sales Effectiveness and Efficiency
* Increased Profits
* Increase in customers served and products placed within customer accounts
• Increased Customer/Employee Satisfaction
• Decreased cost-to-serve
The second “secret” is that virtually every organization has limited resources: People, Money, Time.
Optimization of the respective coverage models - sales, customer service, marketing and channels - still has not been exhaustively studied. The models and tools of the eCRM practitioner provide almost a dot-to-dot like template with which to assure coverage optimization and hence optimal use of the firm’s limited resources.
The third “secret” is that our customers represent a portfolio of assets that we must proactively manage in order to maximize shareholder and stakeholder value.
Whether the resource is time, money, or people, the optimal allocation of resources is a critical issue, a critical challenge, for almost every business organization. Since no enterprise has unlimited resources, it is worth investigating how customer relationship marketing models can provide a critical key to unlock the answer to this problem.

In no functional area of business is this resource allocation problem more true than in sales, marketing, and servicing customers and/or prospects. In fact, the search for the optimal allocation of resources in these functional areas is something akin to the search for the Holy Grail.


In business-to-business marketing the characteristics of the target customer group can commonly be depicted visually as a pyramid, with the largest accounts at the top of the pyramid, and moving down through a group of middle accounts trying to grow larger and support the pyramid are "minor" accounts.
The pyramid graphically shows how, in most mature, competitive industries, the sales function (together with service and product marketing) is faced with:
• Price and margin pressure at the top of the pyramid, where the size of the targeted accounts is the largest
• Margin (cost-to-serve) pressures at the bottom of the pyramid, where the largest number of accounts exist
• An eventual overabundance of competition – once all your competitors realize where you are making your money - in the middle, where the most profit is initially available
• A shrinking middle layer

If, as has been suggested for the last 15 plus years, we elevate Customer Relationship Management, as core strategy, and Sales to a strategic boardroom issue, we can create the greatest synergy by applying the models of customer relationship marketing, customer insight, and knowledge management to the problem of resource allocation.
One Observation
In addition to the five key inevitable outcomes that result from a well-executed customer relationship marketing competence, other implicit problems are remedied:
• Increased sales
• Increased service levels
• Increased customer and employee satisfaction
• Increased customer and employee retention
• Decreased cost to serve
• Faster product introduction, i.e., speed to market
• More controlled management of product migration by targeted segment
• Decreased cost of doing business as a percentage of sales, i.e., sales expense to revenue ratio (E:R)
The Thesis
The planning tools, operational models, feedback loops, and performance metrics of relationship marketing
are templates that create optimal resource allocation and coverage models. What we have created and replicated across multiple firms in the B2B realm is a roadmap for optimizing the allocation of resources, together with the attendant analysis and implementation.

revisiting: Actionable, needs-based segmentation

Decisions, decisions, decision. Targeting, Segmentation and Grading are three of the more important decisions any company can make. In fact, Targeting, Segmentation and Grading (i.e., the valuation of customers, prospects and the “universe” from which to choose) are the primary building blocks of an effective CRM and CEM (customer experience management) strategy. These actionable steps represent conscious management decisions based upon business intelligence, corporate memory, and the on-going strategy of the business plan. “Being in Business” necessitates making decisions. The single most important set of decisions any business-to-business enterprise can make are those involving selection - of the products and services you will provide, of the customers for whom you will provide them, and of the channels through which you will market them, differentiation, sourcing, profitability, etc. Segmentation is at the heart of this selection process. I originally presented this idea of actionable needs-based segmentation more than10 years ago. I want to reiterate the validity of this approach and present some simple tools with which to put these principles into action, while recognizing the need to incorporate the additional insight available to us today as a result of new channels such as social media and the heightening of social responsibility. This “toolkit” is comparable to open-source code. Constructed theoretically over the last 15 + years by integrated databased sales and marketing masters, this approach recognizes that: a. No firm can be all things to all people b. The value of the firm is equal to the sum of all the customers with whom it does business (and yes, your CFO will accept this!). c. All firms are constrained by resource limitations: people, time, money, etc d. It makes compelling sense to invest your sales, marketing, channel management, and customer service dollars and effort in direct proportion to the expected return on that investment e. Especially in tough economic times, investing in customer relationship management and customer experience management positions a firm for competitive uniqueness as business improves Accordingly, actionable segmentation to promote selectivity and wiser investment decisions is one of the most valuable applications for your marketing database and your CRM/CEM initiatives.

CRM: Why now? Strategy may dictate it.

“Clarity of purpose, clarity of understanding” – Zen proverb.

As an effective business leader and manager, you work to keep your organization on track by trying to answer…

a. Who are you?

b. Why are you here?

c. Where are you going?[1]

The primary thing in your mind is to “clarify and communicate Identity, Purpose & Long-Range Intention.”[2] My vantage as an advisor & teacher allows me to look at the world from a multi-disciplinarian’s point of view. Educated to be a scholar and teacher, I wound up in business. Thankfully, I discovered Agribusiness and CRM.

Why CRM and Why now?

My friend and chief project manager reminded me that:

“… there is no time like the present to focus on effective and measurable CRM.”

Now, to broaden my background, I spent much of the last 4 years in banking, so I know firsthand the fragility of the global economy and the importance of cultivating loyalty with our core customers: one of the central tenets of Customer Relationship Management. As I was reminded:

“the current economic conditions absolutely necessitate that you never take your customers for granted and that you know with certainty if your marketing and sales investments are really working.”

Chrysalis Marketing knows CRM and we offer a holistic, thoughtful, and measured approach to implementing strategy, to delighting, and to keeping your customers. We have strong opinions on how to keep them delighted, as well as how to find, acquire, and retain other customers who look like your most loyal and profitable customers. We believe we have a proven, albeit methodical, approach: a roadmap to successful Customer Relationship, and Customer Experience, Management. It is an outshoot of our passion as agribusiness professionals, to put forth and share our passion with you.

Passion, for the student of life, is a fascinating emotion. My passion in business is about creating customer-based, customer-focused business models, in the business-to-business world. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is hard-wired in my DNA. Trained as a critical thinker and recruited into the performance management industry in the mid-80’s, I also have a deep background in Customer Management Centers (usually termed “call centers” – but they can be so much more!) and was a distributor. Now, it often happens that individuals find it difficult to take disparate experiences and build upon them. I’ve been blessed, however. And, “it” all came together for me when I first sold marketing services (research, training, incentives, marketing communications, etc.) into agribusiness, while simultaneously Rapp and Collins offered their first work on database marketing. Those confluence of events coalesced as a business “epiphany”.

This light-bulb that went on helped me realize that data, i.e., simple informational facts, were beginning to be affordable (as the cost of computerized memory & storage plummeted) and that companies could use that data, if they translated it into actionable knowledge, to create a bond with their customers. Thus began databased marketing, followed by what the industry pundits termed “integrated, direct, databased marketing”. Those key trends laid the foundation for Customer Relationship Management and, what we now term, Customer Experience Management.

In most simple terms, CRM is business strategy: a set of decisions that a company needs to cultivate “customer intimacy” as a disciplined, core competency. And it is one that proactively manages the customer lifecycle. CRM uses people, processes, and data, translated into “actionable knowledge” in order to manage these 4 ever-repeating stages of a business’ customer lifecycle and experience management, viz.;

1. Customer acquisition

2. Customer assimilation/nurturing & retention

3. Customer defection and purposeful release

4. Customer “win-back”[3]

Put another way: as business leaders we share certain common challenges as we formalize our strategic direction, viz.:

1. how to build a relevant business model that delivers value

2. how to manage our business in a flat-world, driven in near-real time

3. how to deal effectively in deploying our limited resources: people, time, money, and data

4. how to build loyalty across our “value chain”

Loyalty of the right, core customers forms the basis of well-functioning CRM efforts and the touchstone of our organic growth strategy.

Let me stop for a moment to consider these points in a little more detail. Creating a business model that delivers relevance and value to our targeted customers traditionally ensured that we would succeed. Business Designs, however, grow old and stale. Over the last 15 years, as marketing management grew closer to becoming a scientific discipline, we have learned that customers will leave if, as their needs and ever-evolving definitions of value change, the Business Design fails to provide relevance and value.[4]

The next 2 points, the “flat-world” in Internet-defined time and the limited resources of our companies, should be self-evident, but I think we often overlook the huge implications of both. Issues such as immediacy, transparency, and how we invest our limited resources require deliberate attention to detail – are we sometimes failing to pay close attention enough? Finally, the term “value chain “refers to all those “entities” from product inception, creation, design, etc. to market-coverage.

In sum we can look at the implications for our business strategy. Strategy, per Porter is about “choice; or, more bluntly, per Slywotzky, “selection” is the single most important decision any company can make: selection of things such as:

a. why we are in business

b. who are our targeted customers

c. how will we make money, etc

In today’s financially troubled world, our imperative in agribusiness is to make a decision, to select to use CRM as our governing strategy, allowing for 2 admonitions, viz.:

1. As sellers, we avoid the two most common errors:

a. Wasting time-consuming and price-inflation relationship programs on transaction buyers, or

b. Approaching relationship buyers with transaction-oriented strategies.”[5]

We know that the various functional areas in each of our firms must be aligned better and must cooperate fully, while coordinating all customer-focused activity. As such, our “core leadership Challenge is: coordinating marketing, sales”, product development, operations, service, etc.[6] In practice, those companies that first transform themselves so that this structural and process modification has been done internally. and who then take this same alignment out to the marketplace, when dealing with their channel and end-user communities, have been highly effective and created effective, successful CRM efforts.[7]

So how will this newsletter provide value to you?

As a writer, I am driven by my passion, my experience in business and daily life, and a hope that what I have to say will assist and stimulate my readers.

Our intention for this blog, this ongoing series of attempts to communicate, is to satisfy many levels for our community of participants. Our hope is to:

· present, debate, and synthesize the key business strategies and concepts pertaining to CRM strategy, business design, implementation and practice- inspecting carefully the dynamics across our “value chain”- the producers and growers who are our customers and our channel partners;

· open a new forum in agribusiness, which welcomes dialogue and/or debate concerning the issues of customer definition and selection, sales, marketing & service; channel management, and what we believe is a healthy tension with our channel partners, needed in our distribution-enhanced B2B world;

· offer counsel and guidance

· suggest a “new covenant” across that “value chain”

· suggest how both our metaphorical description of the “game of agribusiness” needs to change , and to suggest just how to “change the game”

· demonstrate a roadmap, constructed under an actionable framework, on how to build a successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, producing a business model (design) that is customer-based and customer focused

We will inspect the key issues of agribusiness. We intend to provide focus and direction of the key management ideas, concepts, strategies, and issues, which have to be accomplished by, with, and through people, processes, and data transformed into actionable knowledge.

For Chrysalis Marketing, our business is to provide value to you in Agribusiness. Our bailiwick includes CRM strategy development and execution, channel management, sales, and marketing, service and call centers; event management, and customer insight. We look forward to hearing from you over the next years.

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[1] Cf., Pg. 27,Executing Your Strategy: how to break it down & get it done, Harvard Press, 2007: story of border guard’s questions to young boy traveling from East to West Germany in the 1960’s.

[2] Ibid, pg. 27: what the authors call “Ideation.”

[3] Cf., Customer Win-back, Jill Griffin & Michael Lowenstein, Jossey-Bass, 2001. In her book, Jill was kind enough to feature the type of customer buying behavior analysis we first proposed in the late ‘90’s while working with Vic Hunter of Hunter Business Group.

[4] Cf., The contributions of Adrian Slywotzky, beginning with Value Migration, are inestimable.

[5] Concurrent Marketing, Frank Cespedes, Harvard Press, 1995.

[6] Ibid., : i.e., the imposition of a “concurrent marketing” framework

[7] Adapted from Cespedes presentation to The Marketing Science Institute 18 months previous.