Your best customers?

Sometime ago, a client of mine in the healthcare industry gave my team and I a very simple assignment: " Increase the sales"!

The client, a subsidiary of a fortune 100 company, was wondering why its USD 100 Million yearly revenues were not lifting up.

This case was actually quite complex and very interesting. We'll see today one of the issues:

Looking at how the client had segmented its market, we found out that only two groups were so far identified. The "best customers" that were driving the sales and the "others" still not converted to a big purchaser status. To our client's credit, the technology was rather new and leading edge in the field of healthcare with actually very little customer data.

After collecting data and conducting a finer analysis, I found out that their market segment was actually constitued of 4 groups: the current "Heavy consummers", the biggest purchases, who were actually driving innovation, research, and whose main focus was to drive technology to even higher levels. The "Pragmatists" who were not specifically doing research but were closely following recent developments, trying to see how to adapt the technology to other forms of applications. The "Strugglers" who were trying to to see how to use the new technology, improve their skills with little information and noone to really turn to. And then, the "Total beginers" craving for any type of information, not even knowing where to start with.
Once these typologies were identified, it was quite easy to address their needs and consequently drive up the sales.

The biggest purchasers, the group that had all the company focus, were actually only making the technology extremely exclusive rather than making it accessible to more! Their interest was research and they had little time for the common user... No need to say that the focus then shifted to the "Pragmatists" who were more apt to develop the use of the technology.

The little conclusion of this very nice case was: you biggest customer is not necessarily you best customer!...

Consultant or Collateral casualty?

Smart people know that in face of adversity, a bit of humor is still the best way to go.

Sometime ago, I was asked by a client to look at a specific issue.

So, I start to observe, collect information, talk with people, and after sometime, I have a quite good understanding of what is going on in the organisation.

I am looking at the team, and the way the issue is tackled. Slowly but surely, a strong feel emerges that a lot of this is assembled together in a mixed bag of approximative processes and people intuitively doing their best to provide "something". The project is meant to seriously affect everyone in the company, and not a departmental head is informed, noone knows or cares about it. More and more, this all venture tastes like a local initiative trying to achieve global results without any serious committment or sponsorship.

Curiously enough, slowly but surely I find myself uncovering information that the client knew in the first place but did not bother to forward.

Still -we are not trained to analyse a situation for nothing- I am wondering why an experimented manager keeps pushing for results in a context that he clearly knows won't yield anything (I'm already at this stage putting a figure on the cash that is going to go down the drain).

So, we are called in to conduct a project that has all the indicators in the orange or red, we are provided basic information, we are limited to resources or support, and lot's of the elements put together don't seem adequate to fit together.

hm... Still looking at the new organisational chart, one can see that the client is meant to report to a new manager reporting to the CIO or CFO while the client function is really to report directly to either of them.

The client assures us that he has "support" from his managers "well cc him so he is sees this is not so easy". Hm, right, what are we talking about anyway, just a "mere" Culture change, nothing too serious, a couple of enthusiastic staff should be sufficient...


It is not so difficult here to recreate the thought process of our client, and why he is calling in consultants to perform a task he is responsible for and that he knows is not achievable.

The clock is ticking, noone states anything clearly. As a consultant you are expected to deliver something. What would you do?