A high-performing customer relations team will be able to make a great success of an average service or product, while an average team will not be able to derive all the growth value from an excellent product or service.
There are false theories that persist. In psychology, for example, most of Freud's hypotheses have been partially invalidated. However, in the popular imagination, they often refer.
In economics, the golden rule is that of the law of supply and demand. The price of a product or service would be the result of a balance between the quantity available and that demanded. Scarcity leads to a rise in price, abundance a fall.
This principle remains in force in most BtoC businesses. And only online BtoC digital services such as Uber, Spotify or Netflix have been able to de-index from this principle.
This is one of the reasons for their extraordinary growth, aided by their permanently accessible digital platforms. But then how to set the price of
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| The customer relationship is much more important than the technology |
Technological innovation is reshuffling the cards
Without demand, it becomes impossible to identify on the market the point of balance between supply and demand which allows the price to be positioned. Innovation is one of the factors that can challenge this principle. It reverses it, focusing on creating demand through potential value. Time spent, production costs, research & development, are self-centered considerations.
What the customer is willing to pay is quite different: the value he perceives. Does the product or service save time, reliability? Does it increase turnover? These are the questions on which the client wants to get a return on investment.
Take the example of a consultant who invoices four days of work for an average budget of 10,000 euros. If the latter saves the company 200,000 euros, who would refuse to pay double? No matter how long he spends on it, the main thing is the end result and the profit for the company.
The same goes for technology. Professionals must forget about equipment, processes and other parameters to be in a persuasive approach by explaining to customers that their product or service responds exactly to their request and that its value is correlated to the gain they will perceive.
The customer relationship, the epicenter of successful companies
This implies a radical transformation: putting the customer at the heart of the commercial approach and in all the company's services. Not so obvious, especially in technology sectors where everyone is so proud of their inventions or in start-ups that always think they have invented the new magic product.
Most companies talk about the What: their technology, their fundamental discovery and the How: the method or the application. Nothing that interests the customer. The key is in the Why. What problem does the company solve or avoid for its customers?
In an innovative context, the company must adopt the principle of demand and supply, that is to say, adjust its value proposition to the unique situation of each customer.
In a B to B world, a high-performance team in customer relations will be able to make a great success of an average service or product, while an average team will not be able to derive all the growth value from a product or excellent service.
The success of an innovative B to B company therefore depends much more on the quality of its customer relationship than on the technological complexity of its offers. Today, companies are being offered the opportunity to engage in digital transformation, but often too much focus on the technological aspect of the digital sector leads you down the wrong path. The real transformation must focus on the human dimension: user experience, customer relations and after-sales service.
This is the very essence of B to B and the law of demand and supply.
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