Five truths about your customer that you might not be aware of.

  • Your customer does not know if you genuinely care about their business or if you are just selling a product or service.
  • They are constantly in doubt if you are competitive compared to the next best alternative available in the market.
  • Can they be sure that you will continuously improve in the relationship even after the sale has been agreed upon and not fall into a state of complacency?
  • They lack confidence that you will respond to their needs and requirements promptly no matter the situation.
  • They struggle to see a clear path to where the relationship with you might lead over time. And if they do, they don’t know how you will get them there.

Not knowing will make them assume the worst.

To build trust and a winning business relationship between you and your customer requires them to feel confident that you can meet their needs. Addressing the above points and filling their blanks does exactly that.

Hence, what your customer expects from a trusted, customer-centric supplier are essentially five concrete actions that you should take on:

  • show them pro-actively that you care for their requirements
  • prove to them constantly that you are able to compete for their business
  • continuously improve what you do and how you do it
  • know how to respond well to their needs
  • define and align what winning means for you and the relationship overall

Our research in B2B relationship management over the past 12 years, how customers buy, and how they want to be sold to, has shown that it is these five actions that lay the foundation for any winning business relationship. It is these five actions that make up your customer centric mindset.

We condensed these findings in our FIVIS customer-centricity model.

FIVIS visualizes the above five actions as a circle, underpinning their close interconnectivity and importance of being addressed simultaneously to make the underlying relationship work. If any of these five actions are not considered, the circle is broken, and the relationship will fall apart.

The goal of any business relationship is to create success, which is symbolized by “I WIN”. The four actions of I CARE, I COMPETE, I IMPROVE, I RESPOND are the main expectations that you need to meet to generate a customer-centric relationship with your counterpart such that you can win.

All actions start with the word “I”. Why? Because building trust is all about you taking action. It is your customer-centric behaviors and actions that make the difference in front of the customer. There is no hiding behind “we”, “our company”, your manager or colleagues.

FIVIS provides the guidelines to think and act in a customer-centric way. It decodes what customer centricity is all about. The model summarizes the essential elements for establishing the base for a sustainable and winning business relationship with your customer:

  • Have I shown my customer that I care about their business needs?
  • Am I prepared to talk about how I will compete for their business?
  • Do I have a plan in place to improve the relationship with the customer even further?
  • Am I responding to all stakeholders and customer needs timely and appropriately?
  • Do I know what winning looks like in the relationship and how we can attain it?

The FIVIS model provides you with WHAT you need to do to think and act in a customer centric way and to build winning business relationships.

Do you want to learn more about HOW to best care, compete, improve, respond and win? Get in touch with us and find out more about the power of FIVIS.

Customer Centricity