Insightful Workshop
Half a day workshop with an enterprise customer is priceless.
Why?
What did I learn about my client?
1.????? Strategic plans
2.????? Considerations
3.????? Priorities
4.????? Technology Roadmap
5.????? Scorecard and Expected Improvements
6.????? Opportunities for future collaboration
Strategic plans
Learning about market dynamics and customer plans is a “goldmine” for a vendor. You can learn about potential expansion plans, changes in market focus, M&As, new territories, new product launches, and many other positive plans you can leverage later to create additional expansion opportunities. You can also learn about cost-cutting and restructuring plans that impact budgets and stakeholders.
Tip: Don’t ask directly about risks or opportunities affecting your business. Let the customer present and inform you about it. If this topic is not on the table, don’t raise it explicitly. Most likely, the aspects concerning your engagement will come naturally during the discussion.
Considerations
In certain instances, we believe we know what considerations and limitations our clients must address. These assumptions can mislead our planning. During the workshop, I learned about specific elements that will significantly impact their business and technology plans for 2025.
Here are a few examples of decision factors your client may consider in next year's planning:
?? With new ownership, they are introducing new procurement processes.
?? They have internal debates about Build Vs. Buy decisions.
?? There are additional regulations expected to drive their compliance and reporting needs.
?? They have a management directive to perform vendor consolidation.
?? They open new locations/offices with plans to form new teams, which requires onboarding and enablement activities.
Tip: The considerations are closely related to the strategic directions and the client’s roadmap. Consequently, one or more will trigger a discussion in which you, as a vendor, will be asked to support or make a few adjustments as part of next year’s engagement.
Priorities
Explicit or 'hidden' priorities clearly guide the client’s business and technology journey. Understanding these priorities helps us align our perceived value with what matters?most to the customer, keeping our focus sharp and our efforts aligned.
During the workshop, I noticed a few potential vendor impact items driven by the new priorities set by the client:
Request to enhance and improve an existing product feature
?? Request to enhance (possibly upgrade) existing service.
?? A consultative approach is?needed to guide the customer in several decision points.
?? Specific technical actions to integrate with another platform
?? Additional enablement is needed for exiting/new teams in new locations (with the appropriate localization)
Tip: “What are your priorities or year?” can be a general question. It's better to put it in context.
“Is XXX going to be of a high priority next year,” where XXX is a topic or initiative that is of interest to you and directly related to your product or service?
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Technology Roadmap
The rapid technological evolution demands ongoing assessments of organizations’ needs and plans compared to their competition. Clients shared various planned technology motions with me throughout the year; however, they were?more explicit in Q4 meetings.
Now that decisions are made, it is the perfect time to be in this circle of trust, where customers share their plans. We may not be in a position to influence. However, we can leverage this inside information and prepare for those changes.
What did I learn about the main drivers of such changes?
?? “Top-Down” directions from management to merge technologies and vendors, leading to cost optimization and contract consolidations.
?? Competitive landscape driving faster time-to-market “initiatives” as they need to launch new products.
?? Mergers and acquisitions in the technology markets leading clients to gain or lose trust in their incumbent vendors
?? Artificial intelligence as a “buzzword” is a compelling reason to onboard and adopt AI-based tools, although not all enterprises are ready to move fast in this direction.
?? Trends in end-user experience drive new demands and expectations based on continuous enhancements in mobile and cloud technology, social media, and AI.
Your score
Many maturity models have been designed for CS teams: Reactive-to-proactive, Support-to-Revenue, and many more.
But how about a client-vendor management maturity model? In this workshop, I encountered a new vendor management evaluation process based on a scorecard.
The introduction of the scorecard evaluation process was a significant moment in the workshop. Our champion's presentation of the scorecard, complete with specific comments and points for improvement, was a valuable opportunity to receive direct feedback and learn how the client perceives our product/service concerning their needs and expectations.
It was a ?30-minute session of ongoing note-taking and a final score that can easily replace the traditional customer's “health score.”
Here are a few specific domains that the customer ranked as part of the overall scorecard evaluation:
?? Various scores are given to professional aspects of the product/service
?? Quality of response to tickets and inquiries.
?? Timely delivery of projects and activities
?? The Details and insights provided in monthly reviews and reports/dashboards.
?? Understanding the customer’s landscape and emerging needs.
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This is not a standard practice; we cannot expect such in-depth assessment from many customers. Still, this overtakes any CSAT/NPS/Health score/Renewal prediction, and we should embrace this kind of feedback.?
Future collaboration
With such visibility into the future strategy, technology roadmap, priorities, considerations, and vendor evaluation, it is natural to discuss future collaboration. Change is bound to happen, and with prior knowledge, both sides can prepare to address challenges and seize opportunities.?
The exciting part is that we identified a few options for improving our collaboration throughout the day rather than during a specific session. The client wanted to strengthen our partnership and provided a strong signal about the future, expecting us to translate it into a meaningful action plan.
Here are a few examples of future collaboration we will review towards 2025:
?? Leveraging AI initiatives planned by the client to experiment with the AI capabilities of our product.
?? Planned Cloud migration with a new Saas-based solution requiring additional integrations and adjustments.
?? Expansion to new territories and locations will require localization and additional enablement, which can speed up the client’s business plans.
?? A potential cost optimization exercise in 2025 to utilize future product capabilities at the expense of existing modules with expected diminishing value.
?? Planning a series of technical workshops to monitor the 2025 plan, maintain high visibility, and reduce information gaps.
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Conclusions
We don’t often get many chances to meet customers for a workshop, especially when the business review is just a fraction of the overall agenda.? It was the perfect time to listen, take notes, and acknowledge the level of trust established with the stakeholders.?
I left the meeting with a handful of action items and another full of insights and new ideas. From a customer management perspective, this is as close as it can get to the top of the hill - now, we need to make the most efforts to keep this position or find a new path to climb higher. ??