Information to research, part 1

(bright music) - [Instructor] We will now briefly review the different areas of information that the CSM needs to ensure they have researched and understood sufficiently beforehand to make them useful to the customer right from the very first time they meet the customer's stakeholders. The first area of information to research is information about the customer. This covers general information about the customer's company, including its size, its personnel, the regions in which it operates, its products and services, its customers, and its value propositions to those customers, its main competitors and position within the industry, its vision, mission, and major goals and strategies, the current challenges and opportunities it faces, and so on. The second area of research is on the products and services themselves, primarily, of course, those products and services which the CSM's own company is providing, but it may sometimes also include third party companies' products and services if these are also being supplied to the customer as part of a wider bundled solution. Whatever has been sold to the customer, the CSM needs to make sure they know what each product or service is, why it has been selected in terms of what function or functions it will perform for the customer, which features of the product or service will be used to perform those functions, and other relevant details such as quantities, customization options, integration options, and professional services options such as installation, configuration, management, maintenance, and support. In a sense, this is the most important area of information for CSMs to research. It can also be the hardest aspect to get right since the customer's outcome requirements are not always obvious or easy to define accurately, even to the customer itself. It is also less objective and more subjective, i.e., more open to differences of opinion than other areas of research. In fact, one of the major problems with determining the customer's outcome requirements is that you might get different answers from different colleagues and yet other responses from different customers' stakeholders. This lack of clarity over outcomes for the initiative does not always occur. If the outcomes are known and clearly defined, then the CSM can simply record them in their research documentation. If they are not clearly defined or uncertain as to their accuracy, then of course the CSM needs to document whatever is known or assumed at this stage, ready for validation with the customer's key stakeholders at a later stage, which we'll get to in the next module. In fact, even if outcomes are known and clearly defined, my recommendation would still be to validate them with the customer to make absolutely sure that they are still the right outcome since, as we have seen, things can change for the customer due to new influences impacting upon strategy and tactics and also due to changes in personnel at the customer's end, which can also cause changes to outcome requirements. More on this topic will be discussed in module four. This, again, is background information about the customer, but this time it relates to why the customer is purchasing the products and services that the CSM is helping the customer to onboard, adopt, and generate measurable value from. I refer to this why as the customer's initiative. In other words, the customer's initiative is a title or a description or a reference name that describes or defines why the customer is purchasing the products and services that the CSM's company is supplying. So for example, it could be a simple case of replacing existing, older, less efficient equipment with newer higher quality equipment, in which case maybe the initiative might be called equipment X refresh, where equipment X refers to whatever type of equipment is being replaced. On the other hand, perhaps this initiative supports a major corporate strategy, such as a new product launch or a company-wide drive to increase customer satisfaction levels. Maybe there's an external influencer, such as, for example, a new piece of legislation that must be adhered to, and perhaps the initiative is to ensure the company meets these new legal requirements. The name is not important in a sense, but what is important is that what the initiative is and what the customer aims to get from it is known to the CSM. Generally speaking, the title for the initiative will be both obvious and also already provided. It might not be referred as an initiative, but rather as a project or a challenge or a strategy. Again, it doesn't matter. I like the word initiative, but when I'm with my customers, I refer to it in the same language that they use to refer to it. In terms of what needs to be known about the initiative, this would include a title and the description of the problem, opportunity, strategy, or challenge that the initiative supports or deals with. It would also include information about what outcomes and deadlines for achieving outcomes are required from the initiative and about the key personnel who are involved with its decision-making and management. It should also include what products and services are being purchased, which of course we've already discussed as a separate area of research to capture, and which users within the customer's organization or indeed elsewhere will be impacted by change engendered by the initiative. For example, which users are involved within capabilities that are being replaced or updated. It's also important to capture the initiative's current status in terms of progress. CSMs are often introduced to initiative at an intermediate stage in the initiative's life cycle rather than being there from the very start. It's therefore important for the CSM to understand where the initiative is up to in terms of work completed, progress made, what activities are going right now, and what will be happening next. It's also good to get a feel for how well things have been working out thus far, both in general terms and also in terms of the relationship with and the attitudes of the customer's key stakeholders. Forewarned is forearmed. One final aspect of the initiative that is worth asking about and documenting at this early preparation stage, but which CSMs may find they need to deal with in upcoming phases of the practical CSM framework when they are in front of and working with the customer's stakeholders is any challenges or obstacles to the initiative that have been encountered and their status. For example, whether a strategy for overcoming them has been developed, and if so, how well it is working to resolve the issue. (bright music)