Valerie Mathieu - A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services

Studies have looked at the leadership style that would be most conducive to the implementation of a customer orientation in the company. They highlight a specific leadership style called transformational leadership 11 . The transformational leader succeeds in getting colleagues and collaborators to go beyond their personal interests, to converge in the same direction and to win their support by explaining and bringing meaning (Barabel and Meier 2015, p. 614).

ZEBOX is an international incubator-accelerator of innovative start-ups, located in Marseille, specialized in the transport, logistics, mobility and Industry 4.0 sectors.

Entrepreneurs are strongly committed to the development of their innovation in order to confirm the existence of a market, to demonstrate the adequacy between the latter and their offer and to attract customers. Their ability to do so will be a determining factor in their entrepreneurial success.

Nevertheless, there are several types of entrepreneurs, including those who are more business-oriented and those who are more “techno”-oriented. The business-oriented profile launches itself into the creation of a company following different professional experiences, which led him to the observation of a non-optimal or even non-existent response to an observed problem. The projects carried by this type of profile are generally relatively well aligned with the satisfaction of a need. A second profile, which could be called “technologist”, develops a technological solution before specifying its potential on the market. The risk associated with such an approach is to see efforts pushed in a non-optimal direction because they do not address a real market problem.

A structure like ZEBOX, positioned on innovative projects, essentially dedicated to B2B, combines both types of profiles. In both cases, one of ZEBOX’s missions, supported by its corporate partners 12, is to help entrepreneurs better understand the markets in which they are evolving (or will evolve) with regard to their specificities and their assets. The support on the strategic aspect of the project will make it possible for them to take the necessary distance to confront the market and exchange with multiple profiles of potential customers. This exercise will be an opportunity for them to refine their value proposition, thus maximize their chances of meeting their market and eventually make the decision to pivot as soon as possible.

The transition from the incubation stage to the acceleration one validates a certain maturity in the customer orientation of the entrepreneur and the start-up. Incubation enables the identification of a first strategic client or a key partner in order to better structure an initial business model. Acceleration builds on this first step to move towards a more ambitious implementation that will make it possible to develop a first portfolio of customers. The evolution of the project during the incubation phase, and then its transition to acceleration, will be all the better if the entrepreneur is able to capitalize on the network to which the incubator/accelerator gives him/her access.

Finally, it can be assumed that there are employees in an organization who have a sort of natural customer orientation at an individual level. These employees can then serve as role models and influence the level of customer orientation of their colleagues or their team (Lam et al . 2010). Empirical studies have confirmed that a leader’s level of customer orientation influences the level of customer orientation of his or her colleagues (Liao and Subramony 2008), and this is particularly true in the context of sales management (Lam et al . 2010).

By putting customers and their satisfaction at the heart of its ambitions, customer orientation is intimately associated with marketing. Customer orientation can also be considered as the implementation of the marketing concept 13. To better understand the marketing concept and its implementation is then a natural step to better enter in the customer orientation.

The marketing concept and customer orientation are very similar in their cultural dimension, since they are both customer-centric business philosophies.

Peter Drucker, the historical and essential author of management, was one of the first to approach the concept of marketing in the early 1950s. He emphasized that marketing is not a separate and specific function of the company, but a global approach of the company from the customer’s point of view. In this sense, the marketing concept is close to a specific corporate culture based on a set of shared values and beliefs that put the customer at the heart of the company (Deshpandé and Webster 1989). Today, it is easier to speak of a marketing perspective as opposed, for example, to a product or production perspective that focuses more on the company’s offer and its capabilities.

By holding marketing accountable for the return on investment of its actions, the company and its shareholders have pushed it to focus on and value two major assets: the customer and the brand. Customer equity, defined as the sum of a customer’s lifetime values, and brand equity, are now recognized as key elements in the evaluation of a company. In B2B environments in general and service environments in particular, it is possible to hypothesize that customer equity plays a more important role than brand equity 14 .

Marketing and customer orientation are not seen as an expense but as an investment that needs to be skillfully managed by finding the right long-term balance between customer satisfaction and profitability for the company. If it is quite simple to satisfy the customer as it is also quite simple to reach a given level of profitability, the difficulty lies in maintaining the balance between satisfaction and profit. Some people will want to allow the occasional and exceptional “sales opportunity” that offers the company a much higher profitability than customer satisfaction. But this imbalance cannot be maintained over time without running the risk of exposing oneself sooner or later to a competition that, either for the same level of profit, manages to offer the customer greater satisfaction, or for the same level of satisfaction, manages to lower the price with lower profitability. The opposite situation, where satisfaction is higher than profitability, is just as dangerous, since it is difficult to imagine the company maintaining its competitiveness over time with such an imbalance in its profitability.

When managers in B2B environments are asked about the percentage of business achieved at such a fine balance, they are often surprised by the proportion of those who acknowledge that they satisfy the customer more than the company. B2B seems to be much more characterized than B2C by an imbalance between satisfaction and profit in favor of the former. The duration of the relationship, the proximity with the customer, the passion for the job and the technical challenge can explain a lesser vigilance of managers on this balance. By wanting to please the customer, the employee often pleases himself/herself first. In this proximity to the customer, which is the basis of customer orientation, saying no to the customer is often difficult.