Customer Intimacy - The ONLY Choice For B2B Software

One of the most monumental business books I've ever read is The Discipline of Market Leaders . Although it was published back in the mid 1990s, the book's lessons are timeless. The simple premise of the book is that ALL great companies must excel at ONE of THREE disciplines of excellence at the expense of the other two. The three Disciplines of Excellence are Product Excellence, Operational Excellence, and Customer Intimacy. Can companies excel at all three? It's possible, but very rare. And very risky.

In many cases, a company's choice of their discipline of excellence is an obvious one. Take Nike. They have a great product, tested exhaustively in labs, engineered to the most strenuous specifications, and then precisely manufactured in a controlled environment. Once shipped to a customer, the product will - in almost every case - perform as designed. Hence, Product Excellence MUST be Nike's choice. Sure, the company needs to be operationally sound and Nike's marketing team must connect and create intimacy with customers through advertising and brand management. But if the product fails it's game over. Fedex's discipline is likewise obvious - Operational Excellence. The product is actually ephemeral, there's nothing physically acquired by the customer. Operational Excellence is the only real way Fedex can compete and differentiate. Sure, the brand is powerful, like Nike's. So you can't completely ignore the other disciplines. But Fedex knows where to focus. Finally, Nordstrom has always been the Customer Intimacy leader. The product is a commodity purchasable anywhere. The POS system (operations) better work. Their choice to prioritize customer relationships (return anytime, any store) is what created leadership and separation for them in the market.

The reason I thought of the book today is that I was pondering the whole concept of Disciplines of Excellence in the B-2-B software space. Which discipline of excellence makes the most sense? And it dawned on me after some thought, the choice is obvious. Customer Intimacy.

I came to this conclusion because it occurred to me that most (if not all) software products will at some point break and fail - sometimes spectacularly - despite how well-designed and well-conceived they may be. There are just too many dependencies involved. It's not just how the software is spec'd, designed, coded, and tested. Where is it deployed? What is the full stack supporting it? Which database is running underneath it? At Imply , we run into this all the time. You can build an analytic application that is beautifully-designed to offer users and customers all the self-service and real-time data and ad-hoc capability out-of-the-box, but if you choose the wrong database to power it, queries slow to a crawl or fail altogether. Or you can only support a handful of concurrent users. End users get the "spinning wheel of death", resulting in the difficult choice NOT to offer interactivity and just publish a daily dashboard that doesn't contain the latest data. When our customers implement Imply, based on Apache Druid , they solve all these problems.

Imagine this scenario: you sell your software to a customer, and the purchase is absolutely mission critical to that customer's business. It's the most expensive software your customer has ever purchased in its history. On the first day of rollout, your software fails spectacularly. What do you do? How do you respond? Does your CEO pick up the phone and make the call? Do you immediately offer concessions and remedies that reflect the seriousness of the outage? Or does the sales rep who sold the software just send a slack message with an apology and link to the support portal? Ask yourself, "How would MY company respond to something like this?" THAT is the question. And that is why Customer Intimacy is the ONLY choice - and the obvious choice - for B2B software companies. How you respond when your stuff breaks, and breaks badly, will forever shape your customer relationships and how they perceive and talk about you to peers and others who might be in market for your solutions.

Customer Intimacy isn't limited to responding to things breaking. For B-2-B software sales, it actually starts before a lead even becomes a lead. It starts with how Marketing is connecting with prospects through digital and ABM campaigns. A message of empathy and insight sharing (not braggadocio and chest beating) can establish an ethos of customer intimacy and begin to build trust even before a rep picks up the phone with a prospect. The qualification and discovery process is another key point to establish intimacy. Listen first, pitch second. Understand your prospect's current situation before jumping straight to slides or a demo. Share a few insights and similar scenarios of industry peers before asking, "Do you have budget?". During the evaluation phase, hold some Lunch-and-Learns or Tech Talks to expand the evaluation team and learn about others in the org who might have a similar need. Understand what motivates your buyers personally as well as organizationally. All of this helps build Customer Intimacy even before the sale is closed.

Post sale, Customer Intimacy is fairly obvious, or at least it should be. The disciplines of Customer Success Management and Technical Support are entirely dedicated to Customer Intimacy post sale. And as mentioned earlier, handling outages and product issues can actually ENHANCE the customer relationship if handled properly.

Customer Intimacy - if truly embraced - can actually permeate the entire culture and value set of great B-2-B software companies. It needs to be constantly reinforced and practiced at every level, every day. "How am I serving my customers today?" must be the question. "I sold my customer my product last year, but when have I last checked in with them?" must be the question. "My product will fail, I know it will. How will I respond?" must be the question. If you're an investor, founder, employee, or consultant working at a viable software company today, you already know the product is competitive (and perhaps even excellent). Your paycheck gets processed. The only real question must be, "Do I love my customers, and do they love me back?"