I recently spoke at a regional Salesforce.com event where the agenda topics were focused almost exclusively on customer engagement. A question that kept coming up during Q&A sessions, and one that we hear frequently in our discussions with customers, was: “I see how this is important for B2C, but does this also apply to our B2B environment?”
The most publicized stories around co-creation are usually in a direct-to-consumer setting, which can lead B2B leaders to dismiss it as something that they can afford to ignore.
One of the most important concepts for executives to grasp in the new environment of customer engagement is that all customers, partners and employees expect to be engaged in continuous value exchanges as part of the “B2Me” environment. We need to start to value engagements with suppliers, distributors and business customers in the same way only consumers have been thought of in the past.
Co-creation, one of four imperatives of customer engagement, can offer opportunities to improve service levels and revenues across the entire value chain. Let’s take a look at one example of how this is being done in an organic way within partner networks.
Co-Creation Within B2B Manufacturing
One way Summa helps to enable B2B executives is through strategy workshops and roadmap planning. Recently, I was facilitating a strategy workshop and the customer shared a particularly interesting example that began at the grassroots level among their sales team.
The customer, a large coatings manufacturer, has a business unit that specializes in selling industrial coatings into factories, plants and warehouses. These coatings are used to protect surfaces in the harshest of conditions, in places like the insides of furnaces at power generation plants. As an effort to improve customer engagement, some salespeople began to perform regular inspections [1] of past coatings applications at customer sites. They would inspect past applications for wear, corrosion, discoloration, etc. and present their findings to plant managers [2] for discussion.
These inspections proved valuable to site managers, and they began to offer feedback [3] on what inspection criteria would be most useful going forward. Salespeople gathered this feedback from a number of plants [4] and refined the inspections. Some plant managers even started requesting that the salespeople inspect the condition of coatings applied by competitors. This opened up competitive sales opportunities that would have been unknown without the co-creation process. These opportunities started to get sales management’s attention [8].
Management and executives at the coatings company were alerted to the momentum and the impact the co-created inspections were having. The process was evaluated and is now being standardized as its use spreads across the entire business unit.
In this example, the independent customer-centric actions of salespeople engaged customers by meeting an unmet need with organic, or bottom-up, co-creation resulting in several positive outcomes including;
- increased intimacy with the customer
- competitive differentiation for the coatings manufacturer
- the discovery of a new way to give customers value through inspection data
- improved understanding of the pipeline of coatings projects with a customer
- insight into competitive selling opportunities for recoat projects
As you read this post, you may already be coming up with examples of how your organization has engaged in activities with its customers and suppliers or any other participants in its value chain that has led or may lead to co-creation. I think we can safely argue that B2B co-creation has been around long before the B2C-centric term co-creation became popular. The automotive industry is a prime example as how the large automakers integrated their suppliers into their manufacturing processes decades ago.
More on how to get started will be featured in my next blog.
