Building Customer Intimacy
1.5 or 2--Day Business Leaders Workshop


This hands-on workshop takes business leaders away from their day-to-day duties, immersing them for a concentrated period in candid, team-building interchanges around a customer intimacy agenda.  Workshop leader Dr. Fred Wiersema challenges and cajoles participants to articulate precisely what it will take to build mutual trust, generate stronger customer impact, and create traction for innovative solutions.  The workshop's emphasis is on calibrating leadership mindsets and effective behaviors, rather than on analytical tools and techniques. 


Target audience
The workshop is targeted at management teams in businesses that rely on extended and lasting relations with key customers.  That includes B-to-B companies, service-intensive firms, and technology-driven businesses.  Fred works mostly with Fortune-500 sized corporations and their business units, as well as with selected growth companies.


Workshop summary
To astute leaders, the mandate of the marketplace is clear -- to conceive and deliver distinctive products and services that solidify and expand their business with key customers.  Said differently, astute leaders strive to make their clients successful.

The challenge is to translate the leaders' mandate into clear directions that their entire organization -- not just frontline employees -- can and will act on.  That is why the workshop highlights four dimensions of leadership to build organization-wide momentum for customer intimacy:

1.  Creating shared aspirations -- the 'rallying cry'
2.  Staying in synch with customers -- knowing them rationally and viscerally
3.  Executing with discipline -- sharpening your practices and processes
4.  Shaping the culture -- what you want to be known and recognized for.


Format
To facilitate interaction and rich discussions, the optimum workshop size is 25 to 45 participants.  The workshop format can accommodate a larger number of people, but with an inevitable drop-off in terms of 'airtime' per participant.


Customization
Each workshop is tailored to fit the client's situation and participant mix.  In preparation, the workshop leader acquaints himself with the client's business context, incorporating input from selected execs and/or customers. 


Outcomes
With its strong action bias, this workshop aims to set into motion a range of follow-on activities.  The intent is for participants to convert insight into practice.  In other words, this is a program with "legs."

Commonly, the workshop spurs leaders to enhance their customer-listening routines, and to get their organizations to explore actions that can be taken to manage customer churn.  Another high-impact follow-through is the pursuit of projects with selected stretch customers, aimed to strengthen key relationships and explore innovative commercial opportunities.