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Customer Mindsets
Understanding and creating value from the customer’s perspective
 Program Benefits
Does your salesforce understand the customer of the 21st century? In a hypercompetitive business environment where customer loyalty is waning, companies must engage their customers in new ways to win sales. Using compelling BTS research on global market trends and business challenges, Customer Mindsets focuses on customers’ top priorities: their corporate goals, business challenges, key players, and decision-making processes. This program gives salespeople new insight into how to sell in ways that better align with their customers’ needs.
Customer Mindsets helps salespeople::
- Adopt the customer's mindset.
- Explore how global market trends and business challenges affect customers.
- Sell value by connecting their own products, services, and offerings to customers' specific business challenges.
- Understand the different concerns and motivators of key leadership roles.
- Align their mindset with the executive customer by focusing on six compelling business topics.
- Explore the typical decision-making process in business environments.
- Identify what information businesses need at each stage of their buying cycle.
- Discover how to influence customer purchasing decisions.
Program Description
Customer Mindsets challenges salespeople to look at the world from the customer’s point of view. Instead of providing a theoretical or abstract discussion of corporate structure, this program offers practical resources in three areas.
First, the program examines market trends and determines how salespeople can differentiate themselves and their offerings by understanding their customers’ business challenges and how they impact their strategy and purchasing decisions. Second, the session navigates through the maze of corporate decision makers and provides a better understanding of the drivers and interests of each key leadership role. Third, the program looks at the customer buying cycle and explores how salespeople can accelerate results by aligning with the customer’s different needs at each stage.
Customer Mindsets embraces the principles of both experiential and action learning. Each implementation is strategically customized to ensure relevance and participant retention. This one-day program leverages the breakthrough technology of maps. Participants learn in teams of six to eight, tapping into the full power of their collective knowledge and experiences.
Map One
1 – Global Market Trends
Participants explore global market trends, from emerging markets to Generation Next, that affect businesses today. Then, they examine which trends have the greatest influence on their customers and their own company.
2 – Vertical Markets
Participants select vertical markets that they sell to the most and consider specific challenges each industry faces. They analyze which trends are most important to these industries and how vendors, suppliers, or partners could help create value for a customer.
3 – Scenarios
Participants review customized scenarios tailored to each client to reflect their customers’ current business challenges. They begin to think strategically as they identify each customer’s vertical market, business challenge, and the market trends that most affect it.
Map Two: Customer Roles
1 – Customer Roles
Participants review the roles of the top executives and leaders in finance, operations, information technology, and sales and align their responsibilities to understand the interests of the person they are calling on to tailor their approach accordingly. Then, they align the business challenges that each role is most concerned with.
2 – Business Mindset
Participants learn to adopt a business mindset—those topics that executives most care about—including suppliers, customers, employees, money, information, and processes. Then, they connect business challenges to these mindsets. Participants write a high-impact question for each topic.
3 – Selling to Customer Roles
Participants consider their company’s offerings and how they add value and benefit customers. Then, they decide how their offerings help customers in each of the roles discussed earlier based on each role’s interests and concerns.
Map Three: Customer Decision Making
1 – Customer Buying Cycle
Participants explore the phases of a customer’s buying cycle. They analyze the differences and similarities between a salesperson’s sales cycle and a customer’s buying cycle.
2 – Customer Needs
Participants look at each phase of the buying cycle and determine corresponding customers’ needs such as information, data, communication, assistance, and support. They discuss different ways to support their customers’ needs during their buying cycles.
3 – Influencing Decisions
Tables review each phase of the buying cycle and identify specific steps they can take to influence their customers during each phase. They discuss how to influence customers to choose their solution and move to the next phase of the buying cycle.
4 – Skill Practice: Customized Case Study
To integrate the session’s learnings, participants engage in a rich, complex, multi-layered case study that has been customized to closely reflect the customers and industries they call on. Each layer of the case study involves a customer in a different phase of the buying cycle. In each stage, participants decide how to sell to this customer and role-play a sales conversation they would have with this customer. The group then debriefs the day and considers how to apply their learning to upcoming sales calls.
Implementation/Customization
Customer Mindsets is a one-day program. The program requires one trained facilitator per five teams of six people each. The customer scenarios and case study are customized to match the companies the participants call on in their sales activities.
An additional optional customization exists for companies that sell into one vertical market. They can utilize an alternative Map One that takes a deep dive into that market. While participants still work with market trends and the business challenges for that industry, they will go into depth on industry-specific trends and challenges, recent news from the industry, and opportunities for future growth.
For an even more powerful approach, combine the Customer Mindsets program with the Customer Simulation for a two-day experience.
BTS - World leader in Customized Business Simulations
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