How many of your customers consider you a "Trusted
Advisor"? I recently came across a brief article in VarBusiness
Magazine called "Becoming
a Trusted Advisor". It listed three methods, one of which is Executive
Customer Briefings. As the article states, in order for these to be successful,
there are three key elements:
- Understanding the customer's business and goals
- Approaching the customer’s problem from a long-term strategy
- Suggesting specific solutions to achieve their business
goals and long-term strategies
Looking closer at these elements, I realized that they
go beyond the context of Customer Briefings or a “sales only” initiative. What if
marketers could think in terms of the business value that their company could
provide customers or potential customers? Then, help convey these benefits
throughout the marketing and sales cycle. How would this affect the development
of valued “Trusted Advisor” relationships?
On a related thought, I recommend reading What
B2B customers really expect, from the Harvard Business Review (HBR), as I found
some of the revelations quite interesting. (If you are not a customer of HBR,
just watch a short ad, to see the article, it is worth it). There is chart in
the article called Customer Expectations Revealed, which shows the relationship between what customers
expect, what vendors think customers expect, and what vendors recruit for.
As a third article of reference on the subject, that
discusses how marketing can actively play a part in developing these
relationships, read Get
Strategic with Account-Based Marketing from Marketing2IT (a TechWeb newsletter
with trends and tips for the IT Marketers that I also recommend).
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