Last month’s blog post addressed the state of outsourcing in the TD industry as a lead-in to better understanding the customer landscape to ensure you get your fair share of the spend. One of the most important challenges facing a business is determining just who their customers really are. This is definitely the case in the talent development industry, where the lines are often blurred as there can appear to be multiple customers within the same organization, each with different needs and decision-making influence. Getting clear on exactly who your customers are, what they really need, and how you are able to satisfy those needs should be your ultimate goal.

Because we usually sell to organizations as the buyers of our products and services, we more often than not think of them as our customers. And, we eagerly display their logos as pride points in our marketing and selling materials. But, are they? Or, rather are the real customers the end-users of those products and services—the employees of those organizations? What is particularly perplexing is that while the organization is indeed always the purchaser/buyer, the end-user is responsible for evaluating whether your offer is at all relevant to helping them improve their performance, either individually or organizationally. In between the organization and the end-user is the internal client, who is often entrusted with decision-making authority as the expert capable of evaluating the efficacy of the offer. Herein lies a very complicated set of dynamics.

The wants and needs of each of these three groups are often different, and indeed in some cases even at cross purposes. For one thing, the criteria and their respective priorities, on which these groups are making their decisions about you and your offer, are usually vastly different. If the purchasing department is the buyer, it may be looking for the best financial deal irrespective of the quality of the offer. After all, talent development is not their unique expertise and they aren’t expected to evaluate the offer from that perspective. The internal client who is most knowledgeable about the industry and comparative offers uses a different set of criteria on which to base their decision. And, lastly, the end-user, if asked, is likely to use evaluation criteria related to just how well the offer helped them address their on-the-job challenges.

There are at least two other potential “customers” to be considered in the broader sense of the word. First, there is the executive team—such as the board, CEO, and senior direct reports—that while represented by all three of the above groups, may have loftier strategic goals and objectives that they expect the offer to help achieve. We would hope these three other groups would understand and support their organization’s strategic imperatives, but sometimes their individual goals and objectives are not immediately linked to those, or at least not clearly perceived as such. The final potential customer with whom you should be concerned is the customer of your client organization, who is often referred to as the customer’s customer. In other words, how does your offer facilitate your client’s organization more effectively addressing the needs of their own customers?

Clearly, the needs of each of these five groups, while ideally at a high level should cross-reference, at the more individual and personal level may not, or at least appear relatively removed. As a result, as a supplier you are taxed with figuring out how to satisfy all these groups’ needs simultaneously. Clearly those suppliers whose offer simultaneously crosses all these paths is likely to win more business than those that don’t. Just getting these respective needs aligned is only part of the challenge. The real challenge involves effectively managing the different, and often contradictory, relationship dynamics of all parties, particularly given you may actually never interact one-to-one with most of these customer groups. Typically, your point of contact and interaction is only with the internal client team. These dynamics are complicated to say the least. How you treat this team and how you interact and respond to them are all extremely critical to maintaining the overall corporate relationship.

In a perfect world, we would expect the internal client to fully understand and represent the needs of all customer groups. Yet, assuming this is the case in place when it isn’t could ultimately undermine your ability to sell in to the organization. Appreciating the needs of the various customer groups is part and parcel to your job as a valued supplier. This will assist you in marketing and selling to them and ultimately retaining them in a long-term relationship.

Have you identified the various customer groups you are serving for your client organizations? How are their respective needs the same and different? Where are the intersections that your offer can leverage? What have you done to ensure your offer can simultaneously meet all their needs, however different?

For more insight, check out The Complete Guide to Building and Growing a Talent Development Firm.