Jermaine Edwards shows how to identify financial, strategic, and operational risks affecting your customer's business. Using a financial-services example, he maps marketplace pressures like regulatory changes and shifting preferences to concrete risks: lost customers, reduced market share, higher costs. He walks through creating a one-page summary that positions you as an expert.
Chapters
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 covering video number 2 of how to be the expert to your most important customers. And this is all part of the Customer Mastery Series. Now, if you haven't seen video number 1, I'd suggest you do that to look at the marketplace. You can click on the icon in the top right-hand corner to go and see that video now, then come back, and this will make so much more sense. Now go and do that, and when you come back, the video will be right here, and we'll start in a moment. So let's talk about risk. Now, risk is something that could be talked about for a long time. In fact, I do whole sessions, day sessions, just on talking about risk. So the whole idea here is that we need to understand those specific things that impact the customer that, if not looked at, would become a risk to their overall profit performance, their financial performance, their ability to compete in the marketplace, and their ability to actually deliver on their own strategies. That's what we're going to talk about— the risks that actually fundamentally for all businesses really make a huge difference. This is the financial risks. These are the strategic risks. And the last piece of this are the actual operational risks. Now in video number 1, we covered a area of how to think about the marketplace and understanding that within the marketplace, we need to understand 3 things. One is the impact points. So what specific parts of the marketplace actually impact your customer's business? What are the actual changes? And what are the actual strategies that your customer is deploying within that marketplace? And understanding that and how those things integrate and actually interconnect together. Now, knowing that from video number 1, the impact points to that particular customer, the changes that are happening that impact them, and the strategy that they might have, now we look at the risks. So let's just imagine for a moment that for your particular customer, they are in the financial services industry. In financial services industry, there's things that have great impact for them. It's a big I right now. The impact how they do specific kinds of business with different people will be things that are regulatory. That's huge for financial services. Anything regulatory will immediately impact how they think about delivering their financial services products to and for customers globally, internationally, within local markets. So that's the impact. And we know that for them, the things that are changing all the time are the way in which their customers are interacting with financial services digitally and in person. So customers are changing all the time. Their preferences are moving and are constantly adapting. And as part of that change, their strategy in the marketplace is being impacted. So their route to market that they thought they might have even 5 years ago has changed immediately within a 6, 18 months period. So their strategy for going to market has changed. So that's the context of what's happening in their marketplace. Huge regulatory impact. Customers are changing, and now their go-to-market strategy has to move as well. So when we move over here, what are the actual risks? Financial, strategic, and operational. Well, let's just look at these individually. So the first thing here is the financial risk here. So what would happen if your customers weren't able to adapt to regulatory change in the way in which they should, or at the speed in which they should within their marketplace? Well, potentially, is financial, but could be loss of customers. Potentially, it could be some loss of customers within that. That could be a huge risk for them directly if they're unable to comply directly to these regulatory issues within a marketplace or a region. Or what happen if they're unable to adapt to change financially for them? Well, actually, it could be more of this potentially, but actually what will happen is they could, they could lose market share overall, which have a huge financial impact on their business. What would happen if with their go-to-market, if they're unable to adapt their strategy to go to market with those specific customers or the people that they want to reach? Well, again, they'll get less of those people, in contact with them and again have less ability or have limited ability to grow their revenue. Now automatically you can see how that impacts their financial status and the risks that might be there for these things happening in the marketplace. And we could do the same thing for strategy, again for their own strategic input, the things that they're doing right now within their business. If The things in their business that they're doing right now, if they don't adapt to regulatory change, what's happened is actually costs go up significantly for them strategically because they're having to shift their strategy. All resources now are being put into different places, and now they have to adjust to change. And that's a huge— that could be a huge cultural shift for a business. Well, let's just look at operational, so how they actually do things within their own business. Perhaps now they actually need to reinvest into particular areas within their business. So now they're having to invest, costs are going up again. Now their ability to reinvest has gone down. So you can see immediately, just with this really simple exercise, if we understand, going back to the whole marketplace video, the impact, the change, the go-to-market strategy, and the different areas of risk that almost every business would look at, but both financial, strategic, and operational, we can see immediately that we could create a very, very powerful page, a one-pager that illustrates exactly what's happening within their business and then make some decisions on how our product and services or how our business could support in helping them solve or at least limit the impact in some of these areas. So for you, in the workbook, have a look, go through the different areas for yourself, think about what's taking place in that marketplace, how it relates back to these 3 areas of risk, and then begin to create your own one-pager for your customer that will help you to position yourself as an expert. And once you have that, we'll go to video number 3, which will talk about where the opportunities are for you and your customer based on these risks and based on what's happening in their marketplace. I'll see you in video number 3.
