3 Power Principles to Map and Accelerate Your Customer Results

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. And if you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. In this video, we're going to talk about the 3 power principles, the lens in which you can think about your customer opportunities. So think about the 3 power principles and 3 different areas that will give you a lens, an effective lens to think about your customer opportunities. The first is red mapping, and red mapping is all about risks. It's all about those things that would get in the way, maybe cause friction with the relationship, with implementation, with any kinds of decisions that a customer may need to make with you to move an opportunity forward. You don't want anything in the way restricting your success, so write those things down. Get others involved. Write out all those areas that might provide a risk to you and the customer for moving that opportunity forward. Once you have it, you'll be empowered to make some proactive decisions to eliminate those things, reduce sales cycle, time to value for the customer, and increase your perceived value of somebody they could be confident saying yes to. Let's talk about white mapping. Now, white mapping is all about those existing products and services that you have not yet sold to the customer. Now, what I'm not advocating here is that you try to sell all of those products and services to that existing customer. The very principle here behind white mapping is understanding the natural next step for the customer. So where are they today? And what is the natural next step for the customer that would make total sense to them based on where they're trying to go, who they're trying to become, and the result that they're trying to get as a business. If you can understand those three things— what do they want, who they're trying to become, and what is the ideal outcome, what is that result specifically— you can then design and think about that product in terms of the natural next step. And when you present it to the customer, it will be a no-brainer to them because you've considered them and not yourself, and they will know that in your intent, but also in the value of the product to helping achieve that goal. So ask yourself the question: does this product here I'm about to share with this customer actually provide them the natural next step to achieving the goal that they want? If the answer is no, do not sell it to them. Do not sell it. Think about the natural next step first, and you'll be on your way to success. Now let's talk about the blue mapping. The blue mapping is the exciting area of thinking about those things that are new and perhaps undiscovered to you and your customer. And there are two questions we need to ask to begin with. The first is, what is it we know about our customer today that if we really tapped into, really focused on, and thought about, could provide new insight and advantage for them and for us in our relationship together? That's a really important question to ask. The second is much more of a futurist question, and it's looking out into the marketplace of the portfolio of customers that you have, or an individual customer that's important to you, and saying, hey, in the future, What is it that they may need to think about in terms of risks, challenges, and opportunities that we as a business could innovate with them, for them, to create brand new market advantages for them that will serve their end customers, their stakeholders, their shareholders, their teams, their employees, their communities? Whatever those things are, how can we think much more broadly, much more futuristically for the customer so that we can now create a new picture of us doing long long-term business together. What is that particular picture? It's going to take some time for you to think about, bring other people in the business to consider, but it's worth doing, it's worth doing this and putting in the time to do it with your business. Because if you can do that and then share some of these ideas with the customer in advance, you'll be sowing seeds for future expectations, sowing seeds of a long-term relationship with them, and it will be an extremely powerful exercise if you're willing to commit the time to do it. So those are the 3 areas, the red, white, and blue mapping areas. I've got a tool that you can use to actually execute these ideas effectively in your business. So download the guide in the link below, and remember to like and subscribe this video if it's had value to you, if it's added value to you in some way, and I'll see you in the next video.