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Hi, welcome back.
In this video, we will discuss how to study clients
to identify their most likely actions and the implications to your firm.
Contact with the customers is important.
Well, they are the source of revenues.
Events or decisions that changed the firms competitive position are important.
And they should be monitored to avoid unpleasant surprises.
As a representative of your company.
You should help your business to identify and
explore opportunities and identify and deal with threats.
In addition, you should be able to influence the decisions of your clients,
current or potential in favor of your company.
To achieve the desire result, some factors are critical to identify changes.
The first, is the clients decision making process, the people involved and
their individual profile and backgrounds.
Decisions are made by people and of course, they do have opinions for or
against your firm.
You should map these people, understand their role,
their ability to influence decision making and their personal preferences.
In this way, your firm can influence these people ethically and legally.
It is also important to know when key people are being replaced.
This is one way to predict the most likely actions.
And you have to learn what they did in the past and what was the outcome.
The second is changes the customer will go through.
Changes in the company like transfers of production site,
manufacturing processes, product portfolio generate opportunities and threats.
The third is the degree of the customer satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with you and your competitors.
This is important from the point of view of attack and defense.
Your firm faces a defensive situation when it provides products and
services to a customer and there is a threat to its position.
This threat may come from processes changes, competitor attacks and
replacement of your solution.
Keep a good relationship with the people involved.
So that you can identify threats as quickly as possible.
Considering that the sales personnel do not always know all the people involved in
the client's processes that use your products and services.
You could engage the people in your firm in this effort,
including customer services, customer support, technical people, etc.
Your company faces an attack situation when a competitor's customer
has a problem with the current vendor and is dissatisfied.
If you have a good relationship with the people involved and listen to their
comments, you will be able to offer a superior solution to your clients.
In cases of attack and defense, it is important that you understand the process
of your current and potential client.
The best way is to follow the manufacturing process
from warehouse to shipment.
By knowing the whole process, you will be able to learn what you need,
to find opportunities in threats.
Following the same reasoning of the analysis of the competitors,
you may estimate the most likely actions and the implications for
the competitive position of your firm and that of your competitors.
However, as customers tend to be much more cooperative than the competitors,
you may interview customers and ask questions on various topics.
It is important to remember that currents have access to information you need.
Also, many people within your firm had contact within the customer.
Therefore, it is important that you educate your team to ensure that they
share the important information so that your firm can tackle them.