Ensuring Satisfaction for Vendavo’s Customers – The Tipping Point

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In mid-2008, Vendavo invested in a Strategic Customer Organization (SCO) to manage lifelong relationships with our customers. Our mission is to ensure our customers gain financial value from their Vendavo solution, experience high satisfaction at all organizational levels, and make progress in their pricing journey. 

As Vendavo has evolved its customer centricity approach, we created a methodology that helps customers increase their competency to grow revenue and margin through their use of Vendavo’s solutions. Our Value Realization approach comprises experts in pricing strategies and analysis that work collaboratively with customers on value generating projects. In over 40 engagements, we have helped customers identify $2B+ of aggregate return on sales (ROS). We then wondered what else we could learn from these findings. To study this, we combined the value realization data with multiple other customer elements and then completed a statistical analysis to identify what attributes were most highly correlated. They are:

• Reference Status
• Value Realized (as a % of ROS)
• Trend of Repeat Business
• Potential for Growth
• Net Promoter Score

One of the most important conclusions we made is that Net Promoter Score (NPS – as measured in a 2010 Survey) is highly correlated with Value Realized, as expected. Customers who have realized the highest ROS are more satisfied with Vendavo. But, what value do we need to deliver to ensure a customer is very satisfied with their solution and with Vendavo?

We discovered the Tipping Point (to borrow the term popularized by Malcolm Gladwell) that produced a significant increase in average Net Promoter Score is when a customer realizes 1.5% or greater ROS.  This important finding prompted us to ask what enabled these customers to achieve success. We identified seven critical success factors:

• Establishing a pricing organization with a senior Pricing Leader (Global Director, VP, or above)
• Ensuring and maintaining senior executive sponsorship of pricing initiatives and a culture of price performance improvement within the company
• Documenting a price competency roadmap
• Evolving the pricing solution, often annually (which may include the rollout of the solution to new divisions and geographies, adding new phases and functions, and fine-tuning processes and performance)
• Investing in end-user effectiveness programs
• Implementing metrics to measure the value generated from pricing initiatives
• Communicating the value and lessons learned via regimented executive reporting

We are incredibly excited to share these findings as this will help us evolve our customer success approach.  It is important to find the key driver of customer success and then implement a company-wide methodology to make customers more successful. The tipping point for Vendavo’s Net Promoter Score is driven by the value that our customers realize from their solutions.

I am curious – if you have invested in pricing, what are your plans for ensuring it becomes a critical business differentiator in your company?