If you work in a competitive B2B environment, chances are that you have very little advantage in terms of technology, price, or any real product differences. That means YOU have to be the differentiator, in order for clients to repeatedly want to do business with you...especially if you are asking them to pay more than they would by going to your competitor.
Millions of interviews with B2B customers has revealed that, as with B2C relationships, the driving force for loyalty is emotion. This tells you that you should throw out everything you know about product features, pricing, and other rational points of differentiation. Why? Because your clients don't care about those things.
Your clients care primarily about how you make them feel. More importantly, how they feel about the impact you are having on their business. You see, clients know they can buy widgets anywhere...but they want the widget seller who adds value.
Here are three questions to help understand whether you are adding *relevant* value for your clients:
1. Do I understand my client's business?
2. Do I bring them new ideas?
3. Do I make those ideas work to improve their business?
If you (or more essentailly your client) cannot easily answer those three questions in the affirmative, then you need to ask yourself how you are adding value for your clients.
A powerful way to look at client impact is to build a dashboard of top accounts, including things like account growth, stakeholder engagement, margin, trailing twelve month revenue. Then by running some driver and threshold analysis you can quickly get an understanding of when accounts are likely to terminate your business or when they are poised for growth. This requires a fair amount of quantitative analysis and management, but can reap huge rewards in the long run.
For more on B2B sales and service, follow me on Twitter @clintcarlos
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