I was a keynote speaker at the Forrester Marketing Forum today in Miami on driving customer centricity in a B2B environment. It was great fun and I had great questions from the audience. I thought I would highlight some of the key themes I addressed. Let me know what you think.

Introduction

Many B2B companies and marketing teams have forgotten that it’s all about the customer. How we deliver valuable customer experiences through our operations at every customer touchpoint and how we build relationships with our customers is what sets us apart from the competition.

HP has millions of customers who depend on us. We currently sell 3 printers per second, 2 PCs per second, a server every 11 seconds and HP fields 25 support calls per second. These customers are our source of growth - as they increase their share of wallet with HP and as they refer HP to their colleagues, peers, friends and family.

If marketing is not creating a better experience for customers and creating a connection to the brand to help grow the business, then it is merely creative spending. Marketing must take on the role of being the Voice of the Customer internally, drive the customer centricity transformation and help design the end to end experience.

HP’s customer centric transformation

Let me share with you the customer centric transformation we have gone through at HP since 2003.

We started our journey by developing a systematic and holistic approach to driving growth through customer loyalty - the Business Performance Chain. We have adopted this framework to understand the relationships between employee engagement, operational excellence, customer experiences and loyalty and growth. The Business Performance Chain has been an important component of our “management of change” effort – 1) it has helped demonstrate the business case for investing in customer loyalty and 2) provides insights to guide investments.

We focused on measuring and managing what truly mattered to the customer. We have many sources of customer insight. Our objective was to use all the customer data and insight to drive investment in the customer experiences that will have the biggest impact on improving customer loyalty and financial results. We have been very focused on identifying those few critical experiences and managing them to become best in class.

Employees and customers are our two biggest assets. Mobilizing the entire organization in every single touchpoint is what will make us successful. We have placed significant efforts in inspiring employees and helping them understand how they can all contribute to the best customer experience.

The future

Moving forward, we will continue our transformation towards customer centricity by combining deeper customer intelligence and experience execution. We will focus on further understanding individual customers within each account, their decision making authority and their needs and behaviors to design world class customer experiences.

Read also the summaries by Peter Kim and Josh Hallett.