White Papers
Fortify Your Business Against Rapid Change and Shifting Power Dynamics
White Paper
Fortify Your Business Against Rapid Change and Shifting Power Dynamics
Companies who achieve success with high-value products are inevitably faced with lower-priced competition when a new entrant comes along and creates a similar “good enough” product at a lower cost. The challenger consequently takes market share from the established leader and its channel partner. B2B suppliers of high-value products find it difficult to maintain the lead against the rising speed of disruption and shifting power dynamics between buyers and sellers.
This white paper explains why innovative manufacturers in the B2B space must actively and continuously monitor the market and the traditional and non-traditional channels to keep their organization ahead of the curve. Only then will they be able to maintain or grow their position whenever new channel dynamics arise and the speed of change increases.
Related Reading: eCommerce Disruption in B2B Markets
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Mitigate Your Growth Risks: A Guide to Building Share in Core Markets
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Mitigate Your Growth Risks: A Guide to Building Share in Core Markets
It is often tempting to search for growth by entering adjacent markets, acquiring companies, developing new businesses, etc. These can be risky plays. At times, the best play is to focus on the core and grow wallet share with your most important, major customers. Often there is ample room for growth here, and clients of ours have demonstrated proven results from following this approach. In addition, it can be a good hedge against the risks from a potential recession.
As B2B companies look to the core to drive growth, focusing on major customers with significant opportunity potential and strong strategic fit can yield dividends. This paper contains guidelines for ensuring proper prioritization of these major customers, building a relationship advantage, being very customer-focused and developing a detailed plan of action to bolster your ability to drive growth and win with the core.
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Tipping the Scale: Master Three Customer Relationship Competencies to Elevate Your Game
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Tipping the Scale: Master Three Customer Relationship Competencies to Elevate Your Game
As new competitors enter B2B markets, it becomes more difficult to maintain growth, profitability and stability. In many cases, similar offerings create a commoditized market where it may seem unclear how to build competitive advantage, especially with your major customers.
As leading business-to-business growth strategy consultants, we’ve seen firsthand the effect of relationship behaviors on market success. For B2B companies with new clients, we’ve implemented strategies to ensure the relationships were not transient. We’ve also worked with companies to turn around relationships that had deteriorated significantly. Clients have even shared horror stories about failed relationships. Over the years, we’ve found that a strong relationship between supplier and customer often can enable competitive advantage and profitable growth for both companies.
B2B companies can differentiate themselves with major customers by achieving a Relationship Advantage. Companies should embrace best-in-class relationship behaviors to elevate their major customer relationships to higher levels to sustain profitable growth.
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Business Model Transformation: How to Remain Competitive in a Shifting Marketplace
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Business Model Transformation: How to Remain Competitive in a Shifting Marketplace
When markets evolve, businesses must transform to remain competitive. Executives should watch for and respond to signals that indicate the need to explore business model transformation. In many situations, the future of a company rests on the fundamental transformation of one or more dimensions of its business model. If a business is persistently underperforming, the market has either shifted significantly and/or a new technology has emerged it’s time to rethink your business model. Having a disciplined approach to transformation and following key principles will ultimately lead to a robust new business model. Executives who identify and appropriately respond to the need for transformation can position their business for long-term success.
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Setting the Foundation for an Effective B2B eCommerce Strategy
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Setting the Foundation for an Effective B2B eCommerce Strategy
When it comes to eCommerce, it’s time for B2B suppliers to move from reactive to proactive. eCommerce can be a powerful lever to drive top- and/or bottom-line growth, enabling companies to reach new markets, take costs out of serving customers, and create differentiated customer experiences to capture market share; but, developing an effective eCommerce strategy requires answering the right questions and putting the right pieces in place to establish a foundation for success.
By setting clear goals, focusing on the buying journey, and making smart decisions on what role they and their channel partners will play, B2B suppliers can set the foundation for an effective eCommerce strategy to drive impactful business results.
This white paper is written in collaboration with the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI), leveraging insights from Blue Canyon’s clients and MAPI’s members on their eCommerce experience.
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Digital Solutions are Sweeping through the Cleaning Industry: Applying Lessons Learned to Your Industry
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Digital Solutions are Sweeping through the Cleaning Industry: Applying Lessons Learned to Your Industry
Across many industries, manufacturers and distributors are seeking approaches to create successful digital strategies. The cleaning industry—involving suppliers of large, complex equipment (e.g., filtration systems), standard devices (e.g., dispensers), consumables (e.g., soap), and expendables (e.g., spare parts)—offers a good example of how B2B industry players are preparing to address these challenges and opportunities.
At the onset, we found that conflicting definitions of the digital landscape—including IoT and other digital technologies such as digital commerce, advanced analytics, etc.—often confuse and complicate strategies. Once understood, successful digital strategies must first and foremost enable suppliers to bring deliberate, quantifiable value to customers. Although not all customers value and want the same solutions, effective digital solutions must prove that the customer will be better off—gaining in cost savings, better service, and/or other additional value.
Business models, including roles and responsibilities and place in the IoT digital ecosystem, must be addressed. Not all industries share similar IoT and digital trends and roadblocks, such as scalability, technology and software learning curves, and cybersecurity. Nevertheless, the pace of change in technology is rapidly increasing, and while some industries such as the cleaning industry will see slower adoption, others will not. Developing a strategy to stay abreast of these changes and be proactively positioned to take advantage of digital opportunities will be an important determinant of future success.
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Customer-Written Plans for Brands and Pricing: Positioning for Success in Complex Customer Chains
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Customer-Written Plans for Brands and Pricing: Positioning for Success in Complex Customer Chains
As suppliers to business markets face shareholder demands for top-line-driven profitable growth, brand and pricing decisions can make a substantial contribution. Effective decisions about brands and pricing can emerge from an overall framework to reflect customer-written plans and segment-specific strategies to improve the supplier’s ability to win business and increase market share. Effective decisions can also improve the profit line by enabling the supplier to command better margins for its products and services. These brand and pricing plans and strategies will respond to the critical success factors central to each business environment and customer relationship. When made from these foundations, brand and pricing decisions can help to perpetuate a virtuous cycle that creates value for shareholders and customers alike.
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New Strategies for the New China
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New Strategies for the New China
Business executives are now being forced to look at long-term operations in China with fresh eyes. It’s not the same country they entered 20 years ago with so much hope and ambition; the economy grew even faster for longer than anyone could have predicted. And yet, for many, the past 20 years of growth and change has brought considerable disappointment.
China today presents four challenges and opportunities, due to its success. In order for companies to continue on a successful path, or reverse disappointing results, we recommend making a hard, realistic set of decisions now that the shape of China’s future is far more clear.
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Look Before You Leap: Product Portfolio Strategies for Price-Sensitive Segments
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Look Before You Leap: Product Portfolio Strategies for Price-Sensitive Segments
Often companies believe it will be easy to expand their offerings into more price-sensitive segments, assuming if they can develop and successfully sell premium, highly-featured products and services, de-featuring will be simple. However, launching a lower-priced offering to meet the needs of a dynamic market is an endeavor ripe with challenges, especially when the goal is to capture market share and, at the same time, maintain profitability. An unsuccessful execution can threaten the very revenue and margins the company seeks to grow or protect, which can lead to cannibalization and an uncertain future.
It’s important to take the time to carefully assess whether to expand your portfolio to enter and capture a price-sensitive market segment. The journey of discovery is complex and requires a multi-dimensional view of the marketplace, competitive landscape, and organizational capabilities. While moving forward with expansion plans may at first appear to be the right choice, restructuring your commercial offer for market segments which are not price-sensitive can sometimes be the right solution.
In this white paper, we will examine the common strategic rationales for business-to-business companies deciding to develop a lower-priced offering for more price-sensitive market segments. We will provide case studies to demonstrate how other firms have made the decision whether to expand their product portfolio, revealing best practices for addressing inherent obstacles.
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How B2B Service Companies Can Drive Growth Through a Customer Relationship Advantage
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How B2B Service Companies Can Drive Growth Through a Customer Relationship Advantage
As human beings, we rely on strong and lasting relationships to fulfill our personal happiness. There’s plenty of research that suggests relationships impact us mentally, emotionally, and physically, with healthy relationships leading us to live longer, better manage stress, and improve our social well-being. This concept is no different in the business world. Healthy business relationships lead to top line growth, stability to manage disruption, and overall sustainability as an organization. Similar to personal relationships, every successful business relationship is built on a foundation of core virtues, such as integrity, transparency, and trust. However, while many business leaders understand the importance of relationships in a business context, many fail to think strategically about how to build and maintain these relationships.
This is exacerbated for those in a business services environment. Business-to-business (B2B) companies depend on a smaller set of customers for a larger portion of revenue, as evidenced with high volume of sales and/or long-term contracts, whereas business-to-consumer (B2C) companies have one-time purchases and/or monthly subscriptions. B2B companies engage with fewer customers using traditional face-to-face interactions and their selection of partners is driven by specific business goals. And more is at stake in the B2B world.
In some extreme cases, a B2B company can lose over 50% of its business if its largest customer were to leave. This is why it’s imperative for B2B companies, especially business service companies who cannot rely solely on a superior product, to become more customer-centric by placing relationship management at the center of every aspect of their business. In our previous white paper, Incorporating Blue Canyon’s Growth Lessons into B2B Business Services, we outlined the five lessons pertinent to driving growth in the business services space. Among these is one growth lesson that we will focus on for this white paper: strategic relationship management.
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Understanding Your Place in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Supply Network
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Understanding Your Place in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Supply Network
The Internet of Things (IoT)—that fascinating vision of a world in which all manner of devices, machines, and systems are connected to the internet—is everywhere in the business press these days. We are now well past the infancy of IoT as a concept (which is generally credited to an MIT professor from the late 1990s). Unfortunately, almost two decades later, we still find ourselves sorting through the hype and searching for the real value of IoT.
For the last several years, the Gartner Group has pinned IoT at the “peak of inflated expectations” on their annual Hype Cycle. Nevertheless, hundreds of startups and hundreds of millions in venture capital have been pouring into this space since the end of the Great Recession. Corporations, large and small, across all sectors of the economy have formed initiatives to purse this prize. Are we on the cusp of a real breakthrough in this space, or are the expectations still beyond the reach of the available technologies and business models?
For many industrial leaders, this represents a significant new challenge. For years, the corporate agenda has been dominated by globalization and operating excellence priorities such as outsourcing and lean operating practices. However, now we find ourselves at a time where effective technology adoption, particularly digital technology, has become the new imperative. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and related technologies, such as analytics, machine learning, and cloud computing, all promise to impact our products, processes, and the workflows of our people.
Blue Canyon partnered with Founder and President of Cobble Creek Solutions, Joe Kann (a former executive at Rockwell Automation who led strategy development and business partnering), to explain how executives have the opportunity to dramatically change the way they compete and add value for their customers. To be successful, they must embrace this challenge, rethink their business model, and build the competencies to leverage IIoT and the skills of other stakeholders.
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Digital Transformation: How to Commercialize Your Breakthrough Internet of Things (IoT) Offer
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Digital Transformation: How to Commercialize Your Breakthrough Internet of Things (IoT) Offer
An overabundance of trend setting technology platforms—from eCommerce to the Internet of Things (IoT) with data analytics—has resulted in a crowded field of emerging ideas, new players, and creative apps. Within this environment, business-to-business (B2B) leaders are challenged to implement new digitally enabled offerings that will ultimately add to, and not dilute, earnings. But how do business leaders know which offering will be successful in the market and which ones will fail to flourish?
Across many business sectors, B2B leaders share their concerns about how to successfully commercialize such offerings. During our IoT panel discussion among four senior executives from Emerson, Zebra Technologies, Johnson Controls, and Komatsu, we learned that commercializing these offers are just as challenging as developing the underlying technology.
As more and more B2B suppliers experiment with connected technologies and begin to implement IoT initiatives at a rapid pace, it’s imperative that suppliers must quickly understand how to effectively commercialize these new ground-breaking offers to stay ahead of their competitors. In this white paper, we will detail the key elements that must be addressed when commercializing an IoT offering, including:
- How to know which customers would benefit from an IoT offer
- How to reach these customers with the right channel partners, and
- How to choose the right monetization model
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Incorporating Blue Canyon’s Growth Lessons into B2B Business Services
White Paper
Incorporating Blue Canyon’s Growth Lessons into B2B Business Services
We have written extensively on the strategic challenge of identifying and taking advantage of new growth opportunities. In 2011, Atlee Valentine Pope, President and CEO of Blue Canyon Partners, co-authored the book, CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs. This book is a culmination of over two decades of experience working with leading business-to-business (B2B) organizations to develop their growth strategies. And in our white paper, Five Growth Lessons, we detail five fundamental lessons for growth we continually apply across our consulting engagements:
- Honor the Customer Chain: Developing and studying the different routes to market provides insights on where there are potential new markets or new pathways to market to take advantage of
- Create Value to Capture Value: To grow in B2B markets you need to develop value propositions that make your customers financially better off
- Segment on Purchase Decision Making: Understanding the different factors that drive a customer’s purchase decision identifies the strategy that will yield success
- Plan Competitive Responses: How to stay ahead of competitors and respond to disruptive elements depends on your position and the segments you play in
- Relationships are Strategic: Relationships enable strategy, and building relationship competencies can drive growth
While our insights from both CoDestiny and Five Growth Lessons have universal significance across various product- and service-oriented B2B markets, this paper explores the unique application of CoDestiny tenets and the first two growth lessons toward establishing growth strategies in business services, specifically. By sharing examples of companies who have successfully expanded their business by offering value-added business services for their customers, we hope to inspire you to consider new approaches to driving growth at your own company.
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B2B Brand Architecture: How to Build Value in a Changing Marketplace
White Paper
B2B Brand Architecture: How to Build Value in a Changing Marketplace
Greater commoditization, the expansion of credible low-cost competitors, increasing variety and complexity of offerings, and the growth of eCommerce means that B2B brand is becoming more important for the success of companies. Having the right brand architecture can be a powerful tool to help a company increase its brand equity and strengthen its position in the marketplace. Yet, many companies fail to take full advantage of a well-designed brand architecture.
In this white paper, we will explain how:
- Establishing and leveraging a strong corporate brand can increase the value of a company’s offering brands and make the company more attractive to other stakeholders, such as channel partners, employees, and investors
- Better coordination across offering brands allows a company to more effectively leverage a strong offerings’ brand equity across its portfolio, and emphasize areas of expertise and enable portfolio/solution selling
- Simplifying brand architecture allows companies to better focus its resources and the customer’s attention on key brands, building greater brand equity; it is important for B2B companies to make sure it considers the customer chain when making key brand architecture decisions
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Identifying and Responding to eCommerce Disruption: A Guide for B2B Suppliers
White Paper
Identifying and Responding to eCommerce Disruption: A Guide for B2B Suppliers
The world of business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce is fast-evolving. B2B buyers are increasingly demanding the same online experience they receive as consumers. Staying ahead of B2B eCommerce will be increasingly important to your organization. You don’t want to fall behind competitors who are seizing market share because they were first to address the challenges of eCommerce disruption. Not only should you want to defend your position in the market, but also to employ offensive strategies to capture more market share.
In this white paper, we will help you identify the potential for eCommerce disruption in your industry and develop strategies and a plan to respond to ensure you remain ahead of the curve. Blue Canyon recognizes that some B2B industries are farther along the path of eCommerce disruption than others—and we have studied them in order to share our lessons learned in this paper.
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Business-to-Business eCommerce: A Call to Action
White Paper
Business-to-Business eCommerce: A Call to Action
When we discussed the state of eCommerce in business-to-business (B2B) markets a year ago, we noted that the disruption caused by eCommerce was less obvious than in consumer markets. Since then we have seen the level of interest, both enthusiasm and concern, increase. A quick look at the modest level of B2B online purchases might suggest that the impact is being over-hyped for most markets; however, we believe that such a conclusion would be dangerously inaccurate for many B2B suppliers.
In this white paper, Blue Canyon will examine the five distinct stages of the eCommerce buying process in B2B environments and provide insight on which critical elements require focus when developing a robust eCommerce strategy.
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A Deeper Approach to Segmentation: 3 Steps to Develop Application-Based Segmentation
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A Deeper Approach to Segmentation: 3 Steps to Develop Application-Based Segmentation
Many business-to-business organizations segment their marketplace based on easily discernable attributes—such as industry, size, and/or location—and use these segments to design their marketing and sales strategies. Yet, what’s often missing is a segmentation approach to accommodate for the different variations on how the customer applies a solution to meet their needs. Rudimentary segmentation that fails to address these variations results in suboptimal sales performance and poor customer experiences.
In this white paper, we will provide you with our insights and best practices on how to account for the specific, perhaps changing, needs of all players in your customer chain given the varying applications of your offering. In addition, we will outline industry examples of how application-based segmentation is devised and implemented.
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Stay Ahead of the Game: How to Recognize and Respond to Disruption
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Stay Ahead of the Game: How to Recognize and Respond to Disruption
Significant changes in your market that call into question the very nature of your business and its future profitability require decisive leadership and dedicated strategies. Disruptive change in an industry often emerges quickly, and incumbent firms struggle to develop effective responses. However, firms have the ability to counter these changes and even harness them to drive profitable growth.
In our previous white paper, What’s Your Play? A B2B Executive’s Guide to Identifying and Creating Disruption, Blue Canyon addressed the first four questions below, providing B2B executives with a framework to think about offensive strategies for disruption. The decision to become a disruptive player, however, hinges on a firm’s understanding of the risks of their market being disrupted. To identify and survive in a market ripe for disruption, companies must understand:
- What is disruption?
- What enables disruption?
- In what ways can disruption occur?
- How can we disrupt the market?
- Are we at risk for disruption?
- How do we monitor for disruption?
- How do we prepare for disruption?
- How do we respond to disruption?
In this white paper, Blue Canyon will examine the final four questions. Drawing on conversations with executives across B2B industries and our experience in multiple engagements in markets facing disruption, we will provide an approach for proactively identifying and responding to disruption.
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Does Customer Centricity Pay Off? An Assessment of the Benefits of Customer Centricity in B2B Organizations
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Does Customer Centricity Pay Off? An Assessment of the Benefits of Customer Centricity in B2B Organizations
Customer centricity has become a popular initiative implemented by B2B organizations, but few resources are available to assess whether or not the investment in such a strategy pays off. We share the results of a recent Blue Canyon study focused on understanding customer-centric initiatives and the investments associated with those initiatives, as well as both direct and indirect benefits.
Through this paper, we provide stories from industry leaders who championed such initiatives, the lessons they learned, and their advice on how to become more customer-centric.
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What’s Your Play? A B2B Executive’s Guide to Identifying and Creating Disruption
White Paper
What’s Your Play? A B2B Executive’s Guide to Identifying and Creating Disruption
Disruption can upend the entire structure of a market and jeopardize a firm’s profitability; however, it also can create great opportunity. How can business-to-business (B2B) companies identify the potential for disruption in their markets, and either defend against it or take advantage of it? With a clear definition of disruption in B2B markets and understanding the drivers, characteristics, and disruption models, companies can devise a strategy to not only defend their business, but to become a disruptor themselves.
In this paper, Blue Canyon focuses on how companies can become disruptors. With a clear definition of disruption, and an understanding of its enablers and how it can occur, companies can develop an effective offense to take advantage of disruption opportunities.
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Driving Growth through Monetization
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Driving Growth through Monetization
To remain relevant among customers and to secure a leading position among competitors, business-to-business (B2B) companies are continuously innovating—launching new products or services, enhancing existing offerings with improved solutions, and/or evolving services surrounded with other capabilities. Despite the fact that these suppliers are creating more value, the issue of how to capture more value is often overlooked, ultimately leading to money left on the table.
In this paper, we discuss the interplay between value creation and value capture, the characteristics of different monetization models, and the opportunities available to suppliers and customers to adopt alternative monetization models. Throughout, we weave in current industry examples and end with a checklist that can be used to begin the process of enhancing your own organization’s revenue model.
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How Much Will Your Customers Pay? And How Can You Capture This Value?
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How Much Will Your Customers Pay? And How Can You Capture This Value?
Two common, high-level questions we often receive from clients around pricing are:
- How much will our customers pay?
- How can we capture this value?
In the business-to-business realm, the answers to these questions are not easy nor is the approach to finding one-size-fits-all answers. Companies deal with many business and market complexities, from different markets/geographies to different product applications to many different stakeholders. This paper offers an in-depth exploration into how to better understand market segments to set an optimal pricing strategy.
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eCommerce in Business-to-Business Markets: Value Creation and Market Disruption in the United States and China
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eCommerce in Business-to-Business Markets: Value Creation and Market Disruption in the United States and China
Albeit eCommerce has been a topic of discussion for many years, this channel has recently begun to permeate an increasing number of once insulated business-to-business (B2B) industries. What slowly started in more consumer-like B2B markets is now creating a ripple effect within the B2B environment, raising the threat of widespread disruption. This paper closely examines the evolving B2B eCommerce environment in the United States and compares it to how this model is developing in China.
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Elevating Customer Focus – More Difficult Than You Think
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Elevating Customer Focus – More Difficult Than You Think
Typical strategies built around product/service and cost are no longer enough on their own for organizations looking to differentiate themselves. Increasing commoditization pressures and challenging competitive environments are challenging many B2B organizations across myriad industries to enhance their customer focus as a way to create lasting differentiation, drive loyalty, and generate sustainable revenue growth. However, becoming customer focused is a major cultural transformation that requires far-reaching shifts in thinking across the entire organization.
While customer focus alone is unlikely to be a winning strategy for an organization, it is a key element that defines winning organizations in a competitive environment. In this white paper, we discuss the meaning of customer focus, address why becoming more customer focused is a cultural transformation, and highlight three areas that enable firms to drive this transformation within their own organizations.
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Is it Time to Rethink Segmentation?
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Is it Time to Rethink Segmentation?
Is your organization’s segmentation effective?
Is your organization segmenting on customer needs/purchase behaviors?
Does your organization’s segmentation address multiple stakeholders?
If your answer to one or more of these questions is no, it is time to rethink your segmentation. When companies’ growth plans are challenged because they are uncertain where to target, they are having difficulty developing distinct value propositions, and/or they are not getting positive results in the market with their offering or sales and marketing activities – poor segmentation is likely a key part of the problem.
This white paper offers three questions to help you explore whether your organization needs to reevaluate its segmentation and outlines a four-step methodology to develop a segmentation approach that can be utilized as the foundation for building a successful growth strategy.
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Understanding and Overcoming Pricing Conundrums
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Understanding and Overcoming Pricing Conundrums
Pricing management is difficult when there are complex customer chains with many steps between the manufacturer and end customer or multiple pathways through alternate channels to the end user. Across many business-to-business sectors, Blue Canyon Partners frequently encounters organizations that operate in this environment. These companies will have a highly efficient channel and satisfied end customers, but profits remain stagnant or decline.
In this white paper, we define three common underlying causes and how companies can overcome pricing conundrums. The paper also identifies early pricing conflict warning signs and provides actions that can be taken to avoid a vicious cycle of downward price competition.
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Beyond Familiar and Emerging Markets: Are Frontier Markets Right for Your Growth Strategy?
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Beyond Familiar and Emerging Markets: Are Frontier Markets Right for Your Growth Strategy?
Since the Great Recession, dramatic changes have occurred in centers of growth around the world. As a result, many executives are now asking us, “Where will growth come from?” and, “Is it the right move for us?” Determining where “the next China” is located for your business is not an easy question.
For any potential investment, it is necessary to evaluate new markets individually along multiple dimensions—not just market size and growth. In this white paper, Blue Canyon Partners outlines a number of dimensions that business-to-business companies should consider and demonstrates how to evaluate these elements using five country examples in Africa and Latin America.
The companion infographic provides a comparison of new markets to the United States, China, and Hong Kong by market size and growth, risk, competitiveness, and infrastructure:
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Measuring the Market: The Foundation of a Strong Growth Strategy
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Measuring the Market: The Foundation of a Strong Growth Strategy
Blue Canyon frequently addresses a number of growth topics, ranging from channel strategies to pricing. One area of focus is growth fundamentals, such as customer chains, customer insights, and understanding and measuring the market. Although basic in concept, these areas can become a business-to-business company’s most daunting task given that it is often far removed from the end customer and operating in a complex environment with many different channels. Identifying customer chains, unmet needs, and market size and growth (when done correctly with reliable data), can lead to better decision-making, improved customer relationships, and ultimately, sustained, profitable growth. When done incorrectly with imperfect information, finding new ways to grow can be difficult. This paper identifies systematic ways to derive a credible understanding of a market.
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Breakout Growth: The Innovation Competency
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Breakout Growth: The Innovation Competency
Whether it be around an organization’s products, packaging, and/or processes, innovation continues to be a primary area of focus, because for many companies innovation is the key to driving top-line growth, competitive advantage, and shareholder value. However, creating a powerful innovation capability is no easy task. In Breakout Growth: The Innovation Competency, the author explains that in order for B2B enterprises to become innovation leaders, they need to move beyond innovation frameworks and programs to establishing a company-wide Innovation Competency. The paper defines four interrelated dimensions of Innovation Competency and shares how organizations can determine their position across each dimension.
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Customer Chains: The Key to Unlocking New Opportunities
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Customer Chains: The Key to Unlocking New Opportunities
Customer chains are a straightforward construct that many organizations could benefit from if managed and understood properly. The potential ease of creating customer chains can be misleading, particularly within business-to-business (B2B) companies that operate in complex and dynamic markets. Over the course of developing hundreds of customer chains throughout nearly two decades, Blue Canyon continues to see many companies struggle to unlock this tool’s potential.
This paper highlights the importance of the customer chain, and how, if properly understood and utilized, it can put companies on a path towards reinvigorated growth and a sustainable competitive advantage. Numerous real-life examples across industries are used to demonstrate that when a customer chain analysis is used to its fullest potential, the end result leads to greater market share, better customer relationships, higher prices, and larger sales volume.
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