Across all industries, customers expect more personalized and focused attention. They expect that everyone across your company knows their history with your organization. They want a rapid response to requests and expert advice to direct them to the best products or services for their needs. This evolution of expectations introduces new challenges for companies and requires them to re-evaluate their approach to customer management and interactions.

Discussions with your management team about their priorities for managing their customer relationships can help you better evaluate customer needs. Asking the right questions can help you understand where to focus your efforts toward building effective and profitable connections with your customers. The following talking points, considerations, and questions can help you facilitate productive discussions with specific team members about building customer connections.

Your vice president of sales needs to maximize sales and revenue. He or she needs to manage pipeline velocity and know where attention must be focused to help close key deals. This VP needs to maintain an overall view of sales targets and progress while coaching the sales team on developing and retaining great people.

Priorities
Your VP of Sales may be concerned about how to:

• Increase sales revenue and improve margins.
• Sell more products and services to existing customers.
• Offer customers self-service options for basic account information and maintenance.
• Promote teamwork in the sales process by supporting information sharing and collaboration, even across geographically separated teams.
• Use partners to assist in the sales process by including them as part of customer interactions.

Questions
Your VP of Sales can provide answers to the following questions:

• How would a more collaborative approach to selling help increase our revenues?
• How would information sharing among sales team members improve our ability to better target customer opportunities?
• How easy is it to include partners in the sales process, from targeting to calls?
• What sales growth would be achieved if information systems provided a holistic view of customer information?

Marketing managers need to have an accurate understanding of the market and know what products and services should be introduced. Priorities might include developing campaigns that enable field and channel partners to work together in improving new product launches.

Priorities
Your marketing manager may be concerned about how to:

• Help channel partners and field sales teams carry out go-to-market campaigns.
• Introduce new products and services and follow market shifts, or build first-mover advantage as the market transforms.
• Know your customer profiles-which ones are most profitable to the company and how to segment the customer base.
• Collaborate with both the sales department and your partners to better serve customers.

Questions
Your marketing manager can provide answers to the following questions:

• How would improving customer connections affect your market offerings and overall brand positioning?
• How would more collaboration in the sales process help you carry out your marketing strategy?
• How well do your field teams and partners collaborate in driving go-to-market campaigns? Are there ways in which they could collaborate more effectively?
• How do you gather field customer information and build it into your marketing plans?

Your customer service director needs to ensure that the customer service team is resolving customer issues quickly and smoothly, even though members of the team may be in various locations. Making sure that the correct customer data can be accessed regardless of location is also a priority.

Priorities
Your customer service director may be concerned about how to:

• Streamline access to critical customer information for all customer-facing personnel.
• Automate population of customer data to help ensure that service history is up-to-date and accurate.
• Provide responsive and complete service resolution to customer issues.
• Keep customer care at the center of the business.
• Monitor partner service-level performance.

Questions
Your customer service director can provide answers to the following questions:

• How will a solution that supports collaboration among your departments improve customer service and satisfaction?
• How do you provide customer data to your partners and take advantage of their ability to address the specific customer concerns?
• How would readily accessible customer data help you to deliver more responsive customer support?
• What information do service representatives have readily available that helps them to understand customers and their needs?
• How do you involve people who have the necessary knowledge to quickly resolve issues?

Your sales representatives need to focus on closing deals. To do this, sales representatives need to have access to complete customer information and the ability to share it with partners.

Priorities
Your sales representatives may be concerned about how they can:

• Understand the value of a product (to the customer) based on demographics and use this information to make intelligent pitches.
• Use shared access to customer data with partners to help close deals.
• Provide a more personalized sales message to the customer, using information on previous customer orders and buying habits.
• Build stronger relationships with existing customers to increase sales.

Questions
Your sales representatives can provide answers to the following questions:

• How will more information about your customers improve your sales?
• How well do you work together with partners to close deals?
• How do you gain insight into future customer needs?
• How do you identify new products that could add value for customers?
• How easy is it for you to maintain up-to-date, accurate customer data? How well is this data maintained?

Customer service representatives need access to current customer information to share with others when responding to customers' requests. Sometimes this requires the ability to work closely with experts both inside and outside your organization.

Priorities
Your customer service representatives may be concerned about how to:

• Provide quality service to keep existing customers satisfied.
• Understand previous customer service calls to better resolve concerns and recommend new solutions.
• Share customer information with partners.
• Quickly locate and involve the right people in the issue resolution process.

Questions
Your customer service representatives can provide answers to the following questions:

• How will sharing information with your partners help you to get better information to your customers?
• How do you get the right people with the appropriate knowledge involved quickly in the issue resolution process?
• How will more real-time information about customer profiles help you achieve your goals?
• How will stronger customer connections help you to provide higher levels of service to customers and influence their levels of satisfaction?