by Mattias Sjovall
Stockholm, 2018
You and the Customer.
A room full of expectations, ambition, coffee and a fog of common
distractions; mobile updates and last-minute laptop typing.
And an upcoming Customer Dialogue.
And as some version of a customer representative; Account Executive, Consultant, Key Account Manager, Business Developer, you have done this a thousand times before and you are confident about delivering the pitch and all kinds of basic answers to questions the customer will probably come up with, except for the special and highly complicated ones. But then you simply propose a new and prepared meeting with all the answers you might need, or even bring a skilled colleague to that meeting. All good.
It’s just that – things have changed. Everything has changed. The customer expects something totally different.
Nevertheless, routinely you start going through given facts, already known by the customer.
Hey, you can skip that, I already know that.
You are used to that response. No problem, objection handling is in your DNA, you just pick up the pace and articulate the simple facts to make them sound a bit more sophisticated.
Hey, really, please tell me something I don’t already know. It took me three minutes before this meeting to google all that you have now told me.
Hard stop, and you are not prepared for this. Additionally, you’re now really regretting you didn’t bring a specialist colleague along for this meeting. But this was just meant to be high-level, a first meeting, an exploratory meeting, the customer talking, not me. This is what you do and have always done.
This is the big change. The character of this meeting, and the expectations.
The phase before the first conversational meeting, the truly first phase in the customer journey, where the customer becomes aware of both the problem and a few potential brand solutions. And collects basic facts about the vendors, product descriptions and market trends – that phase and job is already history for the customer when entering the first vendor meeting. A customer has it all at their fingertips, probably updated a few minutes before the meeting or been researching for weeks. The digital world pays off. The customer expects to meet a specialist in the first meeting. Actually, at every meeting.
Yes, we know this, but what do we do about it?
Additionally, Content Marketing thrives in providing customers with facts and stories before the first face-to-face meeting between the customer and vendor.
But really, what happens when the customer meets the vendor in real life? It doesn’t matter if it is Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C) – the expectation is something else; and the customer demands soon go through the roof, the sky is no limit anymore and we need to do things totally differently.
A customer meets with a vendor to have the complex and unclear parts explained, in their context, personalized, filled with wisdom, best practice and future predictions. It has become a much tougher world for vendors, and this is what Refreshing The Customer Dialogue is about.
As a vendor, how do you pull this off?
There are potential pitfalls like a disconnected understanding or a possible attention challenge. And for the vendor; the topic is suddenly considered fairly complicated and you need to be brilliant to win a smile.
How to be relevant and interesting while delivering a business message with this demanding customer?
It’s all about conducting a customer meeting and in the conversation explaining and clarifying a complex matter. How to instantly create trust in a customer-facing situation by teaching what is potentially unclear to make it clear? And how to align the communication in a personalized way.
You as a vendor will be appreciated and stand out in the competition if you do this well.
It’s about teaching the complex.
And eventually seeing the customer cheer up right there in front of you and honestly thanking you for enlightening them.
Sounds like magic, I just call it The Cassiopeia Method.
And as for all good skills, it takes practice to master this. I can provide the instructions and equip anyone who wants to learn this with enough tools to succeed.
But at the same time, I’m not naive, I believe my approach is only one way among a multitude of other possible techniques and skills, but The Cassiopeia Method is tangible, it is here and offers a good start. Hopefully you’ll find parts of it or all of it useful.
Although, the most critical part of all this is obviously to understand this big shift in customer and vendor behavior and do something about it. And if nothing else, it will create and inspire a better world for the customers and additionally we’ll level up the professional practice of sales, marketing and consultancy.
You won’t find the term The Cassiopeia Method in any scientific papers or business literature with publication date prior to this book, because the term comes from me and the name is there for good reasons.
The essence of The Cassiopeia Method is my distilled experience, insights and continually personalized great feedback from customers and students. It’s built on twenty years of sales & marketing practice, consultancy, university studies, management and teaching. I have been mainly active in the commercial and highly complex Software Technology industry, but I also have years of experience from the classroom format in state schools teaching kids.
There a basically two unique factors when it comes to The Cassiopeia Method; firstly, it is the extreme interest in the receiver of the communication, how you see that person, and secondly it is about using the right perspectives when delivering the teaching. In addition to that, a precondition but hardly unique, is the engagement and level of understanding required in the specific topic you will teach.
Nevertheless, it’s fundamental and also a critical component of The Cassiopeia Method.
I recommend engaging and trying to fully understand the reasons for the overall change in the New Customer Dialogue, because then you will be able to fully implement a new approach in your unique context, and not only mechanically deliver a new communication technique.
You should be prepared and professional but it is important to realize that we are preparing for a moment’s interaction with a human being, and then anything can happen, and it all happens instantly, in the moment. It is key to improve your skills in delivering in present time and this is the cornerstone when you take the customer and student, virtually, by the hand and bring them on a learning journey to explore the complex matter you need to explain to them. There are simple tools and techniques in The Cassiopeia Method to help you as a commercially driven teacher to clarify and make the customer follow you all the way into the darkest dungeons and then out into the light on the other side of the story. Get to know expectation management, an executive summary format, story journeys, zoom in and zoom out, in-flow repetition, the Swedish perspective, play intelligence, digital curation etc.
The customer becomes your student and disciple for a moment.
This works so well because you see the customer as a holistic human being and you put everything in the right perspective. And in the right perspective for the customer, not for you. Keep up the ambition of constant personalization.
You should be able to do this in your normal conversation during a customer meeting. A natural and built-in-way of leading a value-driven discussion forward.
The one-on-one meeting is the primary use case for this, but all the same, this method is as useful for marketers creating marketing content and who aim to offer clarity in the market category, building an Audience and provide appreciated pieces of information.
And it’s just as usable for professional keynote speakers or classroom teachers. When you are on stage at your speaking gig, or simply being a teacher in front of a group of customers and students.
You are not selling what you are selling, directly.
You are earning Trust.
Eventually, you might sell something. That would obviously be
proof of the success, since we are doing all this with commercial intent and objectives.
But the main direct and first objective, and result, of The Cassiopeia Method is to earn Trust.
Because when you have earned Trust from the customer, only imagination sets the limit for a prosperous relationship. And the teaching becomes part of a commercial context and you give yourself a chance to do business with a much more satisfied customer.
You create a better Customer Experience.
Ultimately, this is part of a huge shift in the way we look at and execute a Customer Dialogue. Let us together keep designing a somewhat new and improved world of Sales, Marketing and Consultancy – to new levels of quality and appreciation. Enlighten, clarify and teach the complex, exactly what the Customer is so desperately asking for.
Welcome to the world of the Cassiopeia Stars.