Deliver Insight to Your Customer: Introduction

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

• Explain how the Altify insight map helps revenue teams gather and organize information about the goals their customer needs to achieve and the key business problems they need to overcome

• Describe how revenue teams use this best practice to create and communicate value, build trust with their customers, and develop new business opportunities

 

Today's buyers are more informed than ever before.

In a crowded field where buyers can easily learn about many potential suppliers, you need ways to stand out from the competition. Often, that requires your team to fully understand the customer’s business problems, what they must achieve, and why.

An account insight map is the perfect tool to:

• Gather and organize information about your customer’s business goals and pressures.
• Describe the initiatives that executives put in place to address these.
• Map solutions onto your customer’s business problems.

 

The insight map helps the revenue team to start conversations with the customer that show not only product expertise but also business expertise.

Collaborating with your customer on an insight map gives you a way of providing insights into their business they wouldn't get anywhere else, which helps you increase your value to them.

The customer sees that your focus is on their success.

Above is a typical account insight map. It's made up of cards of various types:

• Goals
• Pressures
• Initiatives
• Obstacles
• Solutions

Together, these tell a story about the customer's business problems and how they plan to address them.

The insight map helps you to get ready for any business conversation with your customer. These kinds of conversations include:

• Doing your initial research and discovery.
• Growing your relationship with a customer who is currently using your solution.
• Engaging after a significant change in the customer's business, such as a recent acquisition.
• Reengaging with an existing account.
• Meeting a new key player or reengaging with an existing one.
• Asking for help from your mentors or supporters.
• Conducting a business review meeting.
• Communicating value following the implementation of your solutions

Using the Insight Map to Create Value in a New Account

Lynn Benfield is an account executive at Retail POS, a company that specializes in advanced point-of-sale (POS) systems, including cash registers and card readers. They sell not just the hardware but also the related software, training, and consultancy services.

Lynn is doing discovery on a new account called MyHealth, a chain of health-care clinics that provide pharmacy services. She has targeted MyHealth because they're likely to have problems her company can solve.

From her experience of other companies like MyHealth, her instinct is that she'll have opportunities to grow revenue in this account for point-of-sale (POS) hardware, software, and training services.

But she doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, and she knows that companies like to know she's done her own research. Her starting point is to understand the goals and pressures MyHealth's executives are concerned about.

Lynn's entry point into MyHealth is Sophie Cooke, the digital operations manager, and Sophie's boss, Susan Linton, the COO. As Lynn’s insight map comes together, she’ll work initially with Sophie to validate her research and fill in any gaps where necessary. She also hopes to earn Sophie's trust in order to gain access to Susan.

She involves her team so that together they can capture their collective knowledge on the insight map.

To structure their collaboration, they ask a series of questions. We recommend that you also use these for each of your accounts.

Question 1: What Business Goals Do the Executives Need to Achieve, and By When?

The account goals on the insight map are the end results MyHealth’s executives need to achieve within a specific time period. These goals may be owned by various executives in the company.

Lynn and her team have done their research – they've gleaned a good amount of information from MyHealth’s company website and the transcript from their recent earnings call.

Through this research, and through conversations with Sophie, they’ve captured not only the account goals but also the specific executive who owns each one.

MyHealth's account goals are to increase their pharmacy revenue to $180 million within two years, improve pharmacy margin by 3 percent, and to increase this year’s overall earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) by 5 percent. The CEO, COO, and CFO, respectively, are the owners of these goals.

In order to understand whether a customer is going to achieve their goals, Lynn must understand what kind of environment they’re operating in – that is, what business pressures they’re dealing with.

Question 2: What Pressures Are Affecting the Goals?

Pressures are the internal and/or external business issues that significantly impact the executive's ability to achieve their goals.

Lynn knows that pressures are key to a compelling insight map, and she's looking for the pressures the key players care about most.

When she gets a handle on the pressures, she'll understand the drivers and priorities for any initiatives the executives are considering.

So to uncover the pressures, Lynn works with Sophie to understand what's affecting or potentially will affect the customer in reaching their goals.

Once she's uncovered these, she'll try to understand:

• How each pressure impacts on business goals.

For example, if one of MyHealth's pressures is ‘Rising costs in the Pharmacy Division’, this will affect their goal to drive margins up.

• Whether solving the pressure(s) has been prioritized or funded, or both.

The pressures that significantly impact on a goal compel the executive responsible for the goal to take action to address the problem.

It motivates them to commit money and resources to a suitable initiative.

They know it's important to keep in mind that pressures can be internal or external.

• Internal pressures are the result of problems within the business that can be fixed, but haven’t been.
• External pressures are issues beyond the business's direct control.

Pressures typically fall into one of the following categories:

Common Internal Pressures

Category	Examples
Financial	Poor cash flow Rising costs Decreasing shareholder value
Operational	Low productivity High turnover Poor product quality

Common External Pressures

Category	Examples
Customer	Increasing customer demands
Competitive	Reputational damage Growing number of competitors
Market	Unfavorable economic conditions Regulatory requirements New emerging markets
Partner	Channel conflict Partner demands Weak performance
Suppliers	Growing supplier dependencies Declining performance
Technology	Rapid digital transformation

 

On their insight map, Lynn and the team capture the pressures that are affecting the executive’s goals.

 

With all the relevant pressures identified, Lynn and the team can have the right kinds of conversations with Sophie, Susan, and others they choose to involve.

As the conversations develop, MyHealth will gain confidence that the team at Retail POS understands their business needs.

Question 3: What Initiatives Are in Place to Address the Pressures?

initiatives are the plans or projects that executives put in place in order to address the business pressures impacting their goals. The high-priority initiatives will have an executive sponsor and access to funding.

Lynn knows that wherever there's an identified pressure with a related initiative, there may be a potential opportunity worth pursuing.

She follows up on her conversations with Sophie about business pressures by asking about the initiatives they've put in place to address them.

There are four things that Lynn needs to know about the initiatives:

1. Are there any initiatives already identified?
2. What are the priorities of the initiatives?
3. What approach, if any, did MyHealth take in the past in an attempt to solve the problem?
4. What problems exist for which there are no initiatives?

When she knows the answer to the first two questions, she can assess whether there might be a potential opportunity. Her customer knows there's a problem and is likely to have a vision of what a solution might look like.

The third point helps Lynn understand what did not work in that past so that she’ll get a better sense of what was broken in that approach.

The fourth would require support from Lynn’s revenue team to help MyHealth build their case for an initiative, enhancing her relationship with them.

Question 4: What Obstacles Need to Be Overcome?

Obstacles are the operational problems a business needs to fix in order to resolve its business pressures. Something is broken, or doesn't exist, and needs to be fixed during the course of the initiative.

Typically, obstacles exist within one of the following:

• The organizational structure
• A process
• The company's culture
• People's skills
• Technology

As Lynn develops her understanding of each initiative, she begins to learn about the obstacles MyHealth intends to resolve.

On their insight map, Lynn and the team include any obstacles that are causing problems or issues, which if not resolved during the initiative will continue to cause business pressures.

Typical obstacles include:

• Outdated tools and processes. (In MyHealth's case, their current point-of-sale software doesn't have stock-tracking integration, which affects productivity.)
• Excessive IT resources required to meet reporting needs. (At MyHealth, there are limited IT resources for existing projects.)

 

The most important obstacles are those that require an existing process to be fixed, or a new one put in place. This is because the customer is more likely to commit funds to fixing something (such as POS software no longer meeting the company's needs) than to simply improving something that's not broken (such as providing more training).

Lynn and the team are particularly on the lookout for obstacles that Retail POS can solve better than any competitor. This will help them to spot areas of MyHealth's business where there might be potential opportunities worth pursuing.

Question 5: How Can You Help the Customer to Be Successful?

The insight map tells a story about what the customer needs to achieve and why.

Based on what they know about the obstacles that MyHealth needs to address, and about the initiatives that are in place, Lynn and the team add the solutions they know will help them.

She may be able to sell some of these solutions into MyHealth, so they represent potential revenue she may be able to win.

Question 6: Are There Any Gaps in Your Knowledge, or in Your Solutions?

Lynn and her team have been working with Sophie to build their story. Next they’ll meet with Susan and other key players to make sure they got it right.

These conversations demonstrate to MyHealth that the Retail POS team has been working hard to understand their business goals and pressures. Often customer’s will ask for a copy of the board so they can share your recommendations with other people in their business.

Susan may point out some information gaps on the board to help Lynn and the team develop it further. They probably won't fill all the gaps on the first review. Lynn and the team may need to connect with additional key players at MyHealth to find out everything they need to know.

 

Lynn’s insight map is a nice visual representation of MyHealth's goals and what they need to do to deliver on them.

The board helps her to communicate this story in a way that creates value and earns her customer's trust.