[00:00:00] My lovely people, welcome to another fabulous episode of the B2B Sales Trends Podcast. Today we're talking about what it takes to lead the customer rather than simply respond to a demand the customer may have made before we engage.
[00:00:19] At the B2B Sales Trends Podcast, we explore the strategies, the ideas and leadership shaping the future of B2B sales by speaking with senior commercial leaders from around the world. Today's guest is Stefan Hartge. Stefan is the Global Head of Strategic Account Management, so that I can get it out, at GE Vernova.
[00:00:43] Stefan is leading an initiative to help account teams engage customers early, shape opportunities before they reach the tender stage and create greater value for both customers and the business. Stefan, welcome to the B2B Sales Trends Podcast. Thank you, Ari, for having me and thanks for the warm welcome. Awesome. Absolute pleasure having you. Thank you for taking time.
[00:01:10] Many B2B sales organizations are still built around responding to a demand that they may have created beforehand, tracking known projects, for example, waiting for tenders and competing once the opportunity has already been defined.
[00:01:31] Now, you have a bit of a different take on that. Why is that model becoming less effective in a market that is growing and changing so quickly? Yeah, Ari, thank you for that question. It's an important one. The traditional way of waiting for a tender model is fading because it assumes that the customer already exactly knows what they need and how to buy it.
[00:01:56] In our today's high stakes, fast changing environment, that's a very rare case. So when you wait for an initiative to bid, you're more reacting to a problem which a customer has already defined, which is often limiting the ability to discuss any other solution.
[00:02:18] So in a way, you're repeating the past. Today, the challenge is more to shift from being a supplier of equipment to the advisor of an outcome. This is what we are today looking at or should look at more into. And that's where we need to create the necessary room, defining together with the customer a strategy.
[00:02:45] We aren't really solving a problem without having this type of conversations with the customer. We are just responding to a symptom. So to remain relevant, we have to move to a more upstream approach where we can help and shape the requirement rather than just reacting to them.
[00:03:06] So in a way, what you're describing, if I understand this correctly, is more you sort of have to lead the customer into the direction that will help them gain their outcomes. And when customers are facing challenges, they may not yet fully understand. Simply responding to their stated need is just not good enough anymore, right? And we see that a lot.
[00:03:36] What does it take now for a sales organization to lead the customer rather than simply follow their buying process? Yes, that's the consequences. Leading the customer requires us to rethink how we use our time. The biggest barrier to being a strategic partner is the reactive trick meal.
[00:04:00] When your organization is so busy to respond to tenders that there is no capacity left for proactive approaches, that actually defines a win. To lead, we must intentionally create bandwidth. That practically means being more selective about where we apply our resources so we can really invest in time in the upstream phases of our customer's journey.
[00:04:31] This creates a powerful leverage affecting basically from three perspectives. First one is the recognition. When you show up early with a vision rather than a price, the customer recognizes you as a strategic partner. A peer, not just a vendor. Also, the organizational effectiveness should come into picture.
[00:04:56] You just stop wasting energy on shotgun responses to every opportunity and focus your best talent on the areas where you can uniquely shape the outcome. And furthermore, the joint success being aligned with our experts, with the long-term business goals.
[00:05:18] We move away from us, with the same, and we go more towards a model of joint success. When the customer success becomes part of our joint strategy, we help to redefine them, our joint strategy. We naturally become a provider of choice for the execution.
[00:05:41] Yeah, I think it's really interesting due to this idea of how do we move to be a strategic partner versus a vendor, right? A vendor provides a product. A strategic partner is really bought into the customer's vision and really helps them achieve that. But that's a different sales motion, right? It's quite interesting. You mentioned moving upstream.
[00:06:08] And the reality is, by the time a formal tender is issued, many of the decisions affecting things like cost, value, competitive positioning, and so forth, they have already been made, right? How can account teams and sellers engage early enough to influence those decisions before the opportunity is really formally defined?
[00:06:36] And not just influence those decisions, but also influence the tender and what goes into it. What's your expertise there to share with the audience? The early engagement means to engage early enough, we have to recognize that the buying process is actually preceded by the thinking process.
[00:07:04] If we wait for tender, we are entering the game when the rules have already been set. To influence these early decisions, I focus on three pillars. The very first one is connecting expert to expert. We need to get our engineers, our system consultants, our technical leaders in front of the customer's equivalents. This isn't a sales call.
[00:07:32] It's a more technical discussion about their long-term challenges. When our people speak their language, we build the kind of trust that finally influences the designs, the specs, before they ever reach out to us with a tender. Okay. The second one is trading insights for access. You have to show up with something of value before you ask for anything.
[00:08:01] Whether it's sharing insights on how to specifically respond to policy impact, which is coming into force. It's often about the end of the transition, provide data-driven outlook, and connect it with their asset performance. We earn our seat at the table being a source of intellectual value, not as a vendor.
[00:08:32] The very third one is then mapping the decision-making journey. Every large project has an internal hidden path of approvals, I would call it. We must map that path to ensure we are in the room when the problem is being defined. Essentially, moving upstream means we stop waiting to be invited. Instead, we help the customer frame the problem in a way that aligns with the unique value we bring.
[00:09:02] It's about shaping the requirements so that a tender, when it finally arrives, reflects partnership. We've already built around the complete solution. That's how I look at it. I'm curious how, I mean, totally makes sense, and I would assume that for your customers, fantastic value throughout these three pillars. How do they respond to that approach?
[00:09:26] What we see as creating demand is about shifting the focus from selling to really co-authoring the future with customers. When there is even no immediate opportunity, our goal is to become an indispensable part of their long-term planning cycle. And we have seen that working in different areas. And I would like to highlight two primary vehicles.
[00:09:54] The very first one, we established a kind of a governance framework, like partnership or contractual boards, where we aren't just administrative. They are strategic agents. They are embedding ourselves into the boards for multibillion dollar infrastructure projects.
[00:10:15] We gain visibility in the entire lifecycle from the initial blank sheet phase of a project throughout tender all the way to execution. And this structure creates a continuous conversation, which makes it very different, rather than a series of disconnected sales cycles.
[00:10:36] The second one, which I'd like to speak about, is we proactively facilitate dedicated forums and industry events. These provide platforms to pick up emerging signals, wherever there's a technology shift, a policy change, a market disruption, and turn those into a dialogue.
[00:11:02] By conveying the mindset to discuss the future of the industry, we position ourselves not just as a participant, but as a thought leader who is helping to define the path forward.
[00:11:16] Yeah, these forums and boards provide the safe space, which is part of the trust we gain, where we can introduce big ideas like new digital efficiency or decarbonization roadmaps. When we pressure specific tender, that is not on the table.
[00:11:40] We allow the customer to explore these possibilities, stress test ideas with us, sentimentally define requirements to play to our collective strengths. That's how I look at this. And so this is interesting because it requires a real proactive approach. And I think you've shared that term already, right?
[00:12:04] It requires the sales culture to not wait, but really engage early in the variety of different channels. And this, again, requires sellers really from what their intuition is, in a way, and their usual behavior of waiting for a demand to happen, and become more intentional in how they create these conversations.
[00:12:34] So, and of course, cultures like this don't fall out of the sky, right? How do you build the mindset and capability required for teams to operate in that proactive way? And how do you scale it also? Yeah, Harry, that is a key question. And I'm not surprised you're asking this question because changing a culture isn't about telling people to work harder and more proactive. It's a big change.
[00:13:03] And I would call that changing the standard work. It's the actual daily and weekly routines that govern how we interact with customers. And I can't stress that enough. In large and complex organizations like ours, we have to provide the roadmap, the way we work, the process. And I would suggest to focus on three practical levels.
[00:13:34] The very first one, surprisingly, we are creating a space to think and being thought leader, but we need routines. So reframing the routines is the very first one I would point. Two, we have to change the questions we ask in our own internal reviews. Instead of asking, what is the status of the tender?
[00:13:57] I start asking, when has it been the last time you discuss the trajectory of this customer's business model with them? Or do we have an engagement plan that maps our experts directly to their counterparts? So basically, by shifting the agenda of our own teams, we are forcing the organization to look upstream. So getting out of existing patterns and implement new routines.
[00:14:25] Second is standardization of new paths. We provide process guidance, the tools and the framework that gives the account managers the permission to step away from reactive cycles. If we don't explicitly create that space and time, the urgency of a next tender will always consume the capacity for proactive development.
[00:14:52] So we have to design the process to reward that long-term discovery phase. The third, to me, is creating a community of practice. That is very much linked with the culture. It's about learning from peers. We create an environment for us and forums or workshops where our account managers can share what they have been working on.
[00:15:20] Just, yeah, what is important, what is needed. When a team member sees a peer successfully use a business model conversation to unlock new opportunities, these behaviors become most effective. And people like to learn from each other. It stops being a managed initiative and starts being the way we win at this company.
[00:15:49] Ultimately, by changing the standard work, we make a proactive path the most natural and rewarding path to take. This is how I think about it. A lot of the times, strategic account management, which you're responsible for at your organization, can easily be seen as relationship building. I'm going to build relationships. I'm going to make sure that I handle all the stakeholders. I'm going to make sure I protect what we have.
[00:16:18] We're going to give them what they're asking for and so forth. Unless its impact is connected directly to the business performance of the organization. So how do you, in a way, hardwire early customer engagement to outcomes such as win rates, cost margins, or customer value? How do you do that? Yeah, you're right.
[00:16:42] Strategic account management is often mistaken for just relationship management. But in complex business relationships, relationships are the enabler, not the endgame. If we want to prove value of early engagement, we have to treat the account like a business line with its own P&L destiny. To harden this, we focus again on three performance-based metrics.
[00:17:11] The very first and natural one is the share of wallet as the most are. So what can we get from that customer? What else can't? We don't just track the wins. We track our addressable share of the customer's total investment. By understanding the total pie and where we are currently positioned, we can identify exactly where we are under-indexed and why. That is one.
[00:17:39] The second one is strategic prioritization, what I also call the dollar reasoning. Why don't chasing everything? We build strategic pillars for each account and every pillar must be backed by a clear business case, what I call the dollar reasoning. For why are we investing our R&D engineering resources exactly here?
[00:18:05] And if we can't articulate that value, both for the customer's business performance and our, then it's not the strategic initiative. It's a distraction. That is the second. And the very third is then the feedback loop. The feedback loop in particular with our engineering, as we are so engineering heavy. This is the most critical leverage point, the feedback loop.
[00:18:32] Because we are upstream, we bring back the granular insights to the customers on cost structures and on pain points. We provide our engineers the specific guidance on where to run an initiative.
[00:18:50] By prioritization of this initiative, with short, medium and long-term impact, we help the entire organization to focus its resources, its capacities, on the level where we will generate the highest returns. By forcing these business cases at the beginning of the engagement, we stop being a group that is chasing every opportunity, start being a group of engineers for success.
[00:19:21] We aren't just building relationships, we are building measurable growth and create a trajectory for our business. That is the way I would connect or hardwire customer engagement with precise outcomes. Love it. Love it. Stefan, we are almost at the end of our time together. The last question I ask on every single podcast is always the same. I know you've listened to some of them and you know what the question is.
[00:19:50] So, in your opinion, what are the three skills every B2B salesperson needs nowadays to succeed? What are the top three skills and behaviors that they need and be excellent in this environment? And if you can prioritize them for me in first, second or third in terms of importance, that would be great. Yeah. Yeah, like we discussed. First one, it's strategic fluency. Fluency. Right.
[00:20:20] It has to be able to sit with the CEO or the board member and discuss their business model and deeply understand what they do and what it is. It's the ability to translate market trends, regulatory shift, financial pressure into a coherent strategy. If you are influent in the customer's business, you are relegated to being a vendor. Right. Second, influential leadership.
[00:20:50] It's the courage to move from serving to leading. It's a skill of challenging to customers' assumption, not being a combative, but being insightful. When a customer feels like you're pushing them towards a better version of their own future, you have stopped being a salesperson and stopped being a leader they rely on. The very third, the system integrator.
[00:21:18] The days of being the lone wolf salesperson, that's over. Success today is about being an architect of an ecosystem. The elite account managers, they are the people who can bridge the gap between two complex organizations, align our engineering services, strategy teams with their counterparts and the customer side.
[00:21:48] It's about building a seamless, shared nervous system between the two customers. And that includes transferring communication and messages, good or bad, in both directions. If you can master these three, the strategy to understand the business, the leadership to drive the conversation, the integration to be the bridge between the organizations.
[00:22:18] That is the way forward. You're not, you're not no longer managing an account. You're managing a partnership that can survive and strive over long term. I have no, nothing to add. And people who know me, that is a very rare occasion. Stefan, you've been an absolutely fabulous guest. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with the community. Thank you for taking the time. And we appreciate your insights.
[00:22:45] Thank you, Harry, for the invitation. And thank you to listen to me. And thanks for the interview. Well, lovely people, leading the customer isn't about responding faster. It's about engaging earlier, anticipating customer challenges and helping to shape opportunities before they are formally defined. Stefan shared today with us.
[00:23:10] That starts with moving beyond the traditional tender process, bringing forward ideas that create value and connecting early customer engagements to measurable business outcomes. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with your team and subscribe on our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts from. Download our latest white paper and learn more about the revenue accelerator.
[00:23:38] Both are linked in the show notes. My lovely people. Until the next time, look after yourself, your loved ones and of course, your B2B customers. Bye-bye.