Across most organizations, the Customer Business Review (CBR) represents the single best selling opportunity sales teams will ever have with their customers. Unfortunately, a lot of companies (and sales professionals) are missing out on fully capitalizing on CBR opportunities.
So what is a CBR? In simple terms, it’s a formal meeting between your Seller or Account Manager and your customer to review the business you’ve done together. These meetings represent a strategic and proactive opportunity to:
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Stay engaged with key customer executives;
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Review performance, goals and objectives;
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Report on the value, savings and ROI of your business relationship;
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Retain, cross-sell and up-sell; and
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Showcase new products, services and innovations.
This type of access and openness with a customer is invaluable, so it’s easy to see why so many companies invest in setting up annual, quarterly or even monthly CBRs. Unfortunately, many companies don’t see the results they expect from these up close and personal meetings. What’s keeping sellers and businesses from maximizing these opportunities? Too often we see companies whose CBR process doesn’t fit the way their sellers are organized to go to market, serve their customers, or grow important areas of the business.
Additionally, companies struggle with the manual processes associated with CBRs, where the need to extract and consolidate data from multiple sources results in fire drills, missed deadlines, and inaccuracies. To make matters worse, companies frequently invest two to three times more than they need to source materials and prep for a CBR.
I’ve had the good fortune to work with several SAVO customers to develop a purposeful and automated approach to CBRs that maximize customer opportunities at a reasonable cost to the organization. These procedures are based on four basic principles that will help provide a framework for the next CBR you work on:
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Discovery: Collaborate with Sales and Marketing Leadership to prioritize ROI opportunities and quantify the business impact of a well-executed process;
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Design: Identify the desired customer interaction, define messaging and data requirements, and develop the presentation wireframe;
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Configure: Define the Business Review user experience, examine data sources and preparedness, and implement the required system integrations to create automated PowerPoint presentations;
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Launch: Develop a communication and training plan with baseline performance metrics and reporting capabilities.
By following these principles, sellers are armed with a simple, streamlined process for generating a CBR. The two key elements are the deliverable design and the automation of the process, which can significantly reduce cycle time and push a high-impact, targeted presentation with accurate data to your sellers, so they’re not wasting time writing content or searching for numbers from multiple sources.
If you’ve prepared for a CBR in the recent past, we’d love to hear about your experience and ideas in the comments section. What are your best practices? Are you automating the process? Are you realizing the maximum value that CBRs present?
If you’re interested in learning more about how SAVO specifically helps design and automate the CBR process for its customers, generating significant cost savings and new revenue opportunities, you can check out our recent webinar on the topic: http://virtual.getupright.com/feature_automatedBusiness.php