February 26th, 2015

Developing Compelling Service Chain Linkages

Linkages are pre-planned connections from one offering that pulls through the next offering. The connections are made by carefully pre-planned and executed sales activities. Of course in reality, linkages do not begin at the end of one project and end at the beginning of the next. Linkages are positioning activities that take place during the initial sales process and during projects. The positioning may not only be related to the next project in the Service Chain, but also can be made with regard to the entire Service Chain.

February 2nd, 2014

Developing True Solutions – Not Product Development

Typically in the Form phase of the Customer Intimacy Journey, you will develop the initial True Solutions™ sets and take them to market. Like product development, a framework and process exists to define, develop and take your Solutions to market in a deliberate and defined manner. This building block is key to your Intimacy Engine™ success, so it is important to recognize early on what is different about developing True Solutions™ compared to typical product development.

So what is different?

November 29th, 2013

Beyond Solution Selling: Customer Intimacy as a Path to True Solutions

During the first stage of the Customer Intimacy Journey it is important to create and deliver solutions that have a visible impact with your clients

 As you know, terms like “solutions” and “customer intimacy” are overused in the management consulting industry, and I believe often mean too little.  In this blog, we’ll try to distinguish our thoughts with not-so-clever use of the terms True Solutions™ and Intimacy Engine™.  I want to talk about what True Solutions™ are and how it is crucial to the building of the Intimacy Engine™ business model.