Customer life cycle

The Customer Life Cycle The Customer Life Cycle provides a lens for understanding the customer’s experience at four critical phases, from buying the solution through the end of its useful life. Each phase offers an opportunity for an innovative salesperson to find sources of differentiation. The following four steps are typical of the customer’s experience with a product or solution: Shopping: Identifying the right solution and vendor options, establishing buying criteria, making initial screening decisions. Buying. Bringing a product or service through the process of contracting, financing, and paying, and receiving supplies and equipment. Using: installing and using the solution, disposing, upgrading, recycling, discarding, replacing. By looking at each of these areas from the customer’s perspective, salespeople can identify opportunities to expand the offering. This may involve providing additional services or add-ons as part of the solution or offering options that add value and generate benefits the customer can’t get elsewhere. 1. Shopping. In this phase there is great variability in how efficiently companies go about sourcing suppliers and alternative solutions and how clearly and accurately they are able to define their search criteria. Suppliers can help by making their services and products easy to find and understand, and providing tools and expertise to help the decision makers clarify technology and other requirements, as well as criteria for selecting a vendor. 2. Buying. Salespeople usually overlook this phase, focusing instead on their own company’s policies rather than on the needs of the customer. By better understanding how the customer buys, a sales organization can help the customer solve problems—offering leasing and financing options, for example, or helping the customer with elements of the purchase such as taking delivery of equipment or supplies. Example: A salesperson selling janitorial and sanitation products to a group of hospitals came up with the idea of using a system similar to the one used for reordering pharmaceuticals to automatically reorder the products as they were being used up. 3. Using. Although usage and implementation are where most companies consciously add value to the offering, few look beyond initial installation and conventional service contracts. This is an area where innovation and in-depth understanding of the customer’s priorities and business processes can produce creative ideas for offering benefits unique to the customer. Example: A salesperson working with a large distribution company helped them increase the efficiency of their warehouse operations by bringing in an expert from her own company to change the way products were being coded. 4. Disposing. Depending on the product or service, the salesperson may be long gone by the time customers reach the final stage of the Life Cycle. Today, there are many new opportunities to differentiate at this point. Companies can emphasize recycling and reusing, as “green” becomes a corporate value. Salespeople can look for ways to help companies that must discard equipment or by-products, provide options for recycling or reuse of part or all of the product/equipment.