Excerpted from TRIPLE FIT STRATEGY: How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships and Boost Growth by Christoph Senn and Mehak Gandhi. Senn is an adjunct professor of marketing at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools. Gandhi is the Head of Research at Valuecreator, Switzerland, where she designs and implements B2B growth accelerator programs.
Today’s business customers don’t just buy products and services; they buy expectations. Yet, even the best price at superior performance is only considered table stakes. What these customers want is the commitment of and access to the supplier’s total operations. They want problem-solving and creative thinking to keep their business ahead of competition. They want partners.
Compare this view to listening to a symphony orchestra—you expect a seamless performance from the entire orchestra. To achieve this, the conductor plays a critical role, even though a symphony is an auditory experience, and the conductor doesn’t make a sound. Still, his or her role is critical in connecting the different sections of the orchestra that cannot all hear each other.
Customer relationships benefit from orchestration efforts. But it’s not just about growing your own business as a seller. It’s about orchestrating mutual growth, and that starts with growing your customer’s business. In our research, we have found that only 15% of frontline sellers meet these expectations. Members of that group double their business in three years, on average, while other approaches suppliers take are stagnant or achieve only moderate growth.
Similarly, our research has shown that only 14% of senior managers have adopted the customer-centric perspective and behavior required to orchestrate better partnerships with customers. It’s worth it to become more like this 14%: these growth champions increase sales and profitability at twice the rate of their peers.
What is the reason for such a discrepancy in growth and profitability?
Our research evidence shows that successful companies move beyond the typical product-market fit type of sales approach to what we call “Triple Fit Strategy.” Instead of mainly promoting the value proposition of a product or service, Triple Fit Strategy seeks to achieve, as its name suggests, three fits between sellers and buyers at the planning, execution, and resource levels.
At the heart of Triple Fit Strategy is a simple question: “What if we—supplier and customer—were one company?”
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Answering this question will establish a shared language, leading to a blueprint for mutual growth at scale. However, there are three key challenges companies need to address in orchestrating business growth in today’s corporate environment:
First, companies must understand the growth trajectories of their business. Rethinking the growth logic based on a strategic dialogue with customers is key to developing game-changer ideas for mutual growth.
Second, companies must navigate the growth journey by executing jointly validated growth plans and continuously keeping the growth momentum.
And third, companies must create favorable conditions for success through upskilling the right people to become orchestrators and growth champions, who play decisive roles in fostering that growth.
Addressing these challenges is why we’ve written our new book Triple Fit Strategy. This book is based on twenty-five years of research and the in-depth observation of more than five thousand business relationships on their quest to drive growth with their customers. The conceptualization of Triple Fit Strategy began with Christoph’s doctoral thesis generalizing his corporate-sales experience, resulting in the first conceptualization of the Triple Fit framework. After extensive field studies, the Triple Fit framework and its sub-concepts were further validated by Mehak in her doctoral thesis. Our work also led to the founding of Valuecreator AG, where we focus on guiding companies on their journey to build future-proof business relationships.
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Our mission is to help you avoid costly breakdowns in business relationships and, instead, achieve breakthroughs by learning how to orchestrate growth. Building on a broad range of examples from different industries around the world, this book offers a diagnostic and action framework to create lasting customer relationships and boost growth. All tools and ideas have been successfully tested by us in business practice with large and small companies from Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Our focus is to share the best practices of value creation across industries and geographies, leading to a completely different growth logic. No longer is it just about adding some growth of 5 or 10 percent here and there. Instead, it’s about multiplying businesses and seeing relationships grow by two, three, or even ten times.
Triple Fit Strategy flips the product-centric view to a customer-centric view. Targeting three fit levels, you can orchestrate value creation based on a 360-degree perspective of customer priorities. The result will be customer-validated growth plans that do not only indicate breakthrough opportunities but are also a cross-check for your corporate strategy. We’ve seen time and again how understanding and implementing Triple Fit transforms businesses.
This excerpt from TRIPLE FIT STRATEGY: How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships and Boost Growth by Christoph Senn and Mehak Gandhi is copyright 2024 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press.
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