The big question of many marketing and sales managers is how to choose technology wisely and what this has to do with customer centricity. The wealth of technological solutions is growing rapidly in all business areas; including marketing and sales. This makes it difficult to determine the right path of digital transformation and to understand how this is all linked to customer centricity. In our daily life, we observe that many marketing and sales managers feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of new possibilities. Some therefore choose to push technological decisions out into the future and forego opportunities. Others struggle with making the right tech decisions and end up making unfortunate choices that come back to haunt them soon after.
In a recent article David Dubois, a professor of marketing at INSEAD business school, analyses the process behind technology investment decisions of successful B2B companies. He confirms that a customer-centric mindset and data-driven marketing capabilities are vital. Combining some of his main points with our experience, here are a few main take-aways:
Key take-aways
- Having mutually value-creating relationships with customers is a prerequisite in B2B.
- This requires the company to have an intimate understanding of its various customer segments that goes far beyond demographics and transactional information.
- The company needs to make a conscious decision about what kind of relationship it wishes to have with each customer segment.
- This will build the basis that drives the choice of technology for supporting the chosen relationship type(s).
- Hence, customer centricity drives digital transformation.
In essence, this means that decision-makers need a much greater understanding of their customers than of technology when they think about digital transformation in marketing and sales. Hence, not much has changed for marketing and sales managers. Keep the customer in the centre of your attention – or in other words live and breathe customer centricity – and you’ll do just fine.
Read the original article by Prof. Dubois here or refer to one of our earlier blog posts on a related topic here.
