What competencies do you wish you had identified earlier on?

mllewis

When transitioning from a traditional services vendor to an outcome-focused strategic partner, have any of you identified competency gaps within your organizations that you would have benefitted by identifying earlier in your transformation?

Carlos Alves

To mention 3 (only):

• Listening to the customer
• Understand business challenges
• Return on Investment (understanding, calculating, and presenting)

mllewis

Thanks, Carlos. I appreciate the quick response.

PatrickMartin

I think it starts with what Carlos mentioned, understanding the customer. Technology providers need to shift from building product functionality to driving value (business outcomes). If you can understand what business outcomes your customers are aiming for, build an offer that is aligned with these outcomes, measure the value your solution brings to the customer, you are in good shape.

Patrick McGowan

Great question. I'd pick these three as the most recurring competency gaps I see when working with companies on the transition to creating and delivering outcome based offers:

1. Outcome-based offer design and management - creating and managing outcome-based offers is different "sport" and they new skills and competencies needed to do this well are often overlooked by companies. They believe their existing NPD (new product development) processes and teams can just "pivot" and do the same for outcome-based offers. It rarely works out. I would put the items above (listening to customers, understanding their challenges, calculating their ROI, etc. as critical skills that go un this category).
2. Solution selling - selling an offer that promises or guarantees an outcome is very different that selling other solutions. We often see a gap in the skills that the existing sales organization has. Many companies assume that all current sellers will be able to effectively sell the new outcome offer, but in practice, it's usually only a small percent of current sellers that can do it.
3. Customer success / tracking the outcome - this one may seem obvious, but often companies get excited about an outcome based offer but never close the gap of "how will we measure whether the outcome is getting delivered." I'm putting this with customer success (as I think that's a natural fit for the competency) but this one can't be under estimated. Often, new business systems, data sharing agreement, analytics, and - perhaps even new data scientists - may be needed in order to effectively track and report against the outcome delivery.

Hope that helps!