Connect with your customers
When you go to your customers, you’re really trying to get the pulse of what is going on in the markets you serve. Especially during challenging economic times, customers not only represent your financial support, they provide a wellspring of information on the condition of the market at any given time.
As Enslin settled into his role, he visited with customers and began to paint a picture of their evolving needs and what SAP could do to meet those needs in the coming months and years.
“I spent day after day listening to customers, understanding their problems and how they were trying to be successful,” Enslin says. “It’s just a matter of asking them over and over, ‘How can we help you?’” It’s getting from the customer’s vision to your vision, and to realize that, you have to move at incredible speed. You can’t become consensus-driven. You have to say, ‘We’ve made a decision, we’re headed in that direction, and these are the things we need to change in order to be successful. Once you do that and people start to see success, the rest will follow.”
In the months after Enslin assumed his post, he and his executive tea
m began to debate over the best way to interface with customers. It had to be effective, and as important, it had to be cost-effective.
“We had an internal discussion over what we should do. ‘Should we do this thing; should we save the money? Is it going to help our business? Are people going to fly to Orlando to go to an SAP conference?’” Enslin says. “It’s amazing what customers will tell you when you ask them.”
What customers were telling Enslin was that the world of business was changing with the economy, and SAP would need to adapt, as well. As the economy bottomed out, customers were more focused on cost-saving solutions. Now that the economy has started to rebound a bit, SAP’s customers are once again starting to look for innovative, creative solutions.
“You have to make sure that you’re adjusting your business model to meet your customers’ demands,” Enslin says. “That’s step one. When a market is growing, you’re probably more focused on innovation. Where we’re at now is that customers have seen enough of the efficiency, enough of the employee reductions and capital restrictions. We’re to a point where the profit-and-loss sheets are starting to look pretty good and they’re asking how do we innovate again. So we’ve adjusted our internal business model, and now we’re working with our customers to say, ‘OK, let’s innovate together.’
“What I’d tell other business leaders is listen clearly to your customers on what they need, and then you have to figure out how to adjust your business model.”
The larger your business is, the harder it will be to adjust how you do business. You won’t be able to react to every ripple and wave you encounter. So you need to prioritize what types of services you want to provide and what metrics and indicators will serve as your call to action as an organization.
“When you’re putting together a longer-term vision, it maps around a couple of areas depending on what kind of customer signals you want to go after, what solutions you want to bring to market and how you bring those solutions to market,” Enslin says. “As you’re pulling in the long-term thinking, you need to know how the support services will be structured to actually cater to customers in the future. That is around HR, your financial department, how your contracting process works and how you enable the marketing process with the Web. All of those processes have to be aligned in order to match your vision.”
In a down economy, you sometimes have to make short-term compromises with your vision and business model, recognizing the market’s limitations while still keeping your eyes on the long-term prize of growth and a rekindled culture of innovation.
“The first thing you need to say is, ‘In this quarter, we need to stabilize the environment, we need to go to market, the customers are going to be spending, but they’ll be spending less, and that’s probably going to keep occurring through 2009 and ’10,” Enslin says. “Once you have that in place, what you next want to look at are the longer-term things that you want to work on. For us, our customers are significantly involved in SAP, and they want a relationship with SAP that is a three- to five-year relationship.”
Ultimately, you might need to modify your definition of success in the short term, focusing on short-term goals with your customers and creating company benchmarks focused primarily on incremental improvement.
“There are some things, as you go through this, that are so important,” Enslin says. “One, how do you measure the success of your business? Employees are used to measuring success in terms of growth, but we changed the way we measured success in 2009. We started to articulate to our employees how many transactions we were doing as part of a quota, our customer satisfaction, our partner satisfaction. We started to articulate how we were investing in the future. Once employees see that you’re investing in the future of the business and gain a sense of confidence in that, it’s amazing what you can do when you have that positive flow in the company.” <<
How to reach: SAP North America, (800) 872-1727 or www.sap.com/usa
