- Sales Planning Tutorial
- Sales Planning - Home
- Sales Planning - Introduction
- Organizing Internal Resources
- Characteristics of a Sales Plan
- Corporate Strategies
- Priorities of a Sales Plan
- Creating a Sales Plan
- Customer Centric Organization
- Sales & Marketing Relationship
- Marketing Research Techniques
- Sales Planning - Pricing Decisions
- Business Continuity Planning
- Sales Planning Useful Resources
- Sales Planning - Quick Guide
- Sales Planning - Useful Resources
- Sales Planning - Discussion
Customer-Centric Organization
A customer-centric management cares the most about the satisfaction of its customers, their needs and expectations from the product. Over the last few years, organizations have adopted effective organizational structures, where people implement policies that revolve around impressing more customers and getting customer satisfaction.
Gone are the days when the main goal was to create more demand and sell more products. At that time, the customer wasn’t involved even as a third person in this process. Today, a company that does not communicate with its customers is quickly deserted. This is in sharp contrast to those times, when daily activities were handled in the background by human resources and accounting department, with virtually no interaction with the customer, either directly or indirectly.
To be customer-centric, organizations have to pre-analyse all the expectations a consumer has from a product of a particular segment. This phase involves asking three crucial questions −
- What is the company’s definition of a satisfied customer?
- What is the customer’s expectations from us?
- What is the desired customer experience?
As you can see, the central focus of the organization now is the satisfaction of the customer. Organizations that are truly customer-focused, instruct every department to think in terms of increasing acceptance in the customer’s mind. This means that the organization will not directly make contact with the customer, but will generate some strategies and processes to increase the customer experience.
Successful organizations have their customer-centric processes defined to all their employees, so that they also can participate in the supply chain and meet the standards of excellence, communications, latest technology and other factors.
The following steps help companies to enhance the quality of its output, increase customer satisfaction, save costs and deliver high profit margins. There are numerous advantages that an organization has over others, if it has a customer-centric sales team −
Loyal Customer Base − If you impress your customers and satisfy them with your services, then it is difficult for your competitors to take away your clients because they rely on your services.
Competing on Overall Value − If the price of your product is so high that only a few customers can afford it, then the product will flop in the end. The price of a product indicates many factors like quality, availability, etc.
Benefits to End-Users − The end-users or customers that receive the final services will look to get all the benefits including cost, quality and the corresponding services. Once it is given to them, the customers remain loyal to the organization and have a long-term relationship with them.
Benefits to the Organization’s Staff − If your organization has more sales and builds numerous long-term customers, then it gives profits to your team. If your company gets good profits, then you and your staff also receive more benefits.
With the help of a customer-focused organization and all the other departmental synergies, it is time to analyse more positively on how to divide appropriate work among other departments. This will also help in knowing the significance of all of the other departments in the sales planning process.
In organizations, where the cooperation and integration between employees is weak, marketing teams are often found at odds with the sales teams. In such companies, it is a common occurrence to find that the marketing team hasn’t attached the key benefits of products, before sending them to the Sales Team.
Sometimes, the Sales Department has some documentation and follow-up issues with the marketing department. In such cases, often the managers have to enter the picture and sort out all the problems between them.