Are You Building a Partnership with Your Company’s Power Core?

Understanding your company’s power core is a crucial step in knowing how to proceed with your customer agenda. It will illuminate why, based on the core of power in your organization, you are able to accelerate some things and encounter obstacles on others when it comes to customers.

The power core is an unusually strong yet often unspoken force. Never underestimate the power of its pull. Because executives make decisions through the filter of the power core, people want to perform there.

There are six common power cores that have the greatest impact on driving customer profitability inside the corporate machine and across the silos:

1. Product

2. Marketing

3. Sales

4. Vertical Business

5. Information Technology (IT)

6. Customer

You’ll find one of them to be the dominant factor in decision-making and direction in your company. You may also see another in a supporting second place of strength.

The first step in creating a power core partnership is to identify your primary and secondary power cores.

• How does your company define success?
• What are the areas of strength the company prides itself in?
• What part of the company did the leaders of the company come from?
• What does the company excel at?
• What competencies are stressed?
• What competencies do the “stars” possess?

You need to know how closely the reinforced and innate skills of your organization line up with the ones necessary to drive customer profitability.

Knowing the strength and pull of the power core will:

• Uncover the hot spots and potholes for driving a customer profitability culture.
• Frame the scope of work required to influence change.
• Provide clarity on the approach to take in creating partnerships with leaders.
• Zero in on your company’s motivation and ability to drive toward customer profitability.

The end game is to incorporate the drive for managing customer relationships and profitability into the power core.  Take the time to think strategically about your company’s power core and what its impact will be on your ability to drive the customer effort.