Kris Safarova 00:45
Welcome to another great session. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And I have another gift for you. You can get McKinsey and BCG winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume, PDF. And today we have with us Kristof Sam, who is an adjunct professor of marketing at INSEAD, he frequently works with leading companies including Coca-Cola and Microsoft, and he’s also chairman of boutique consultancy AMC, and the founder and CEO of value creator, which is a software startup advancing the practice of value creation. Christoph, welcome.

Christoph Senn 01:38
Thank you so much for inviting me.

Kris Safarova 01:41
Looking back on your journey. Can you walk us through some of the key moments and challenges that brought you the way you are today, doing the work that you’re doing today, and maybe you could share with us what were some of the pivotal experiences or decisions that really shaped your path?

Christoph Senn 01:57
Well, that’s a great question to start with, and I would admit there were a few moments where I was indeed thinking by myself, what does it now mean, which path to take? But I would say the most decisive moment which all triggered, in fact, this research, we are seeing some results here today, and the journey still continues. Was when I was leaving or graduating from university and had a chance to land the first job in coding industry, environment so international scope, a lot of travel, lot of different cultures, behaviors, uh, sales methodologies, to learn and to to perform. And then I was observing, I would say, quite a classic pattern every year, or we as a supplier were negotiating really tooth and nail with our customers, and we were fighting to the very last nickel and dime until this repeated then the other year. But there was one sales rep who just seemed to avoid these negotiations, and I was kind of getting curious, what is this gentleman doing differently? And I started to observe his behavior, and then by asking him a few question, it struck me, what if we could not necessarily replicate this behavior and clo cloning would anyway network, but if he could kind of codify his secrets and make it available also to my sales team, including myself, when I was talking to customers, that could be really beneficial. And so the whole, the whole journey started, and of course, there are a few other milestones, but I think observing this special behavior was really a key moment which started the whole research.

Kris Safarova 04:10
And if we step a little bit more back, could you maybe share with us how you ended up becoming a professor? Because obviously you had so many other paths to follow, but you became INSEAD professor

Christoph Senn 04:24
I couldn’t plan for that. In fact, I was a teacher by first training, and I think you have a wonderful career as well, with several wonderful milestones. But I think the passion for education always stayed with me, but I also found it very interesting to explore business. I always saw this as a fascinating not test bed, but living. In proof of application of concepts. And I would say I was tempted to stay in industry, but then, as life plays out, you get an offer, why don’t you come back and teach, and then I accepted to return from corporate life to university under the condition that I could still work together in an advisory role with real life companies. So ever since 30 years, I’m carrying two hats. One is the more the educated researcher hat, and the other is really go in the front line, talk to senior management teams and try to help individuals and organizations to build better business relationships. So I was fortunate to be many, many times at the right moment, at the right crossroad. And of course, there were a few mentors, which I will give credit to, who also advised me. Now it’s probably better to do this or that, so you cannot do that all along

Kris Safarova 06:10
100% meeting key people along the way. Sometimes it’s even one person that can make tremendous difference. I’m so glad that you had people supporting you along the way. So let’s talk about your work. What is triple fit strategy? All About in

Christoph Senn 06:25
one sentence, triple fit strategy flips this traditional single fit perspective. This is my product, and you should buy it or take it or leave it flips that single product market fit perspective to a three fold fit. So when I was observing this sales reps behavior I was talking about before, I quickly learned that he was not just going out there and sold all the time. He was not selling. He was rather collaborating with his customer, and that, by the way, became one of the titles of our recent article. Stop selling, start collaborating. Quite provoking, but it says it all in one line. But this gentleman was telling me, look, it’s not so important whether our products are really the best or not, but what’s important is that our strategies match, to a great extent with our customer strategy. And that does not mean that we have to have full alignment or partial alignment, but we have to agree on the priorities. And that’s a first fit area. But when I see, okay, where do you get that from? He said, Okay, I’m talking to the right people, boardroom to post room, top level to frontline level. And I communicate in a way which is not suspicious. I’m not the threatening seller’s style. I will openly also admit some weaknesses, and that creates trust. So these three blocks, strategy, relationships and communication, form what we call a first fit at the planning level. But there are more fits, because when we come back then to products and solutions on dispute that you have to have good products and cannot conquer the market with a lousy offering. They derive from your knowledge on strategies on both sides. So that is important, that you don’t start with your product first, which is, I think, a little bit counter intuitive to what you hear every now and then in the old school innovation teaching, okay, have this wonderful invention, and then you just go out and be successful. But products and solutions alone will not make it. So you also need processes and systems to execute it properly. So that’s the second fit. And then, of course, it’s all about resources. What about the people? What about the structures they operate in, hierarchies, legal entities and so on, plus the knowledge on both sides, explicit or tacit knowledge, which forms another level, the third one we call resource fit. So when I summarize triple fit, also, because it’s a three fold fit, we’re no longer talking about this product market fit. I’ve got this product, and you can take it or leave it. No, I have a planning fit with strategies, relationship and communication all aligned. I have a execution fit with solutions, processes and systems align. And I have a resource fit with people, structures and knowledge aligned. And that means that we are creating a connection between two organizations. Organizations, which is far broader and stronger than anything most sales methodologies that were talking about before, hence the name triple fit, planning, execution and resource fit. But the fun part is, it is all here, but how do you get there? I think that is probably, if I would have to summarize the whole logic of the book in one sentence. It would mean think about, how would we try to shape the industry together, we as sellers and us and buyers, if we were one company, what would we then prioritize? Prioritize? How would we talk about things? Or maybe stop doing some things, or start doing something? So what if we were one would call naturally for a broader perspective, not just one fit, but three feet, I think, in a nutshell, the whole underlying principle of triple fix strategy.

Kris Safarova 11:04
This is a powerful way to think about it. So what are some of the questions to ask clients to get a better sense of how an organization can develop something that is most helpful to the client?

Christoph Senn 11:15
I think this is where our research really has brought us a few steps forward. Um, in good practice, we developed about 150 questions, and then we tested these, and we boiled it down to about 90, and then 30, and finally, 10 questions. And I think there are 10 questions which every seller wants to ask their customers, I would say, at least their strategic customers. And in business to business or business relationships as such, you always have quite important relationships. So it’s a limited number and you can afford to ask these questions. The first question is, what is going on in this relationship? How well are we performing? And that is kind of an icebreaker question, which is more or less similar to what some of our viewers and listeners probably know as the Net Promoter Score. Would you recommend this supplier to peers or to other companies? But it goes deeper, because when you look at the perception behind if a customer rates you on a scale from one to five, you are quite good, but you only get four stars out of five. There is a reason why there are giving you four but not five stars. But if you stop with this one question, and I think that’s a little bit the challenge, you’re not getting enough substance and the insights why this is the case. So there are nine more questions which we advocate and encourage companies to ask. And each question is associated with one of these building blocks of the triple fit canvas. And it starts with a strategy question, of course, well, are our do we really understand each other’s strategies, and especially us as a supplier? And what’s important is, when you go through these questions, it probably takes about 10 minutes to gage the customer’s perception on that this is a wealth of information, which you then can go back and not only thank the customer, but also invite the customer to explain. Why did you give us here only three stars out of five? Or Wow, my God, you only gave us two or one star. There must be something which we are not doing well enough, especially compared to competition, and that sparks, usually, a dialog which is going well beyond the classic product price discussion. So it’s no longer a quantity and volume discount, it’s really, oh, if we would improve that, we could perhaps create more value than we think, and it’s mutually mutually beneficial. So few questions trigger a conversation that is extremely valuable. So it’s not rocket science, but it’s more a matter of whether you want to do it.

Kris Safarova 14:39
Kristof and out on the stem questions, which top three you would use if you could only use three? I

Christoph Senn 14:46
was tempted to say, this is an unfair question, but I would not limit it to three. It is if I would have to choose just three. I. Guiding principles, then I would say, okay, at these three levels, the planning, the execution and the resource fit, I would look for, how well are we aligned in the planning, how well are we aligned in the execution, and how well are we aligned in the resource allocation? And usually it has a little prefix, realign, reconfigure and reallocate. Realign the planning, reconfigure the execution and reallocate the resources, because in most business relationships, something is already going on. But to go deeper, my recommendation is, indeed that for each of these three levels, you want to ask a few more questions, and let’s stay with the three, then we are, in fact, by with the three by three matrix. So it’s not complicated or complex. It’s just a holistic view, and I would compare what we have built in form of this triple fit Canvas as a tool for for business leaders and sales professionals. I would compare it to the dashboard of a car or an aircraft. You will not fly your aircraft just on the heading or the speed. You also want to check the altitude, you want to check your fuel, you want to check your aging contact and the weather and so on. So you need a few instruments to make sure that the whole trip is safe and smooth, and that’s the same with business relationships. So there is a minimum number of elements you have to have on your radar in order to run a business relationship. So I hope you can, you can accept that extension of that the number of questions,

Kris Safarova 16:56
of course. Thank you so much. So when you started applying this in working with clients. What surprised you?

Christoph Senn 17:03
Oh, there were quite a number of surprises. First surprise was, most of the time, the feedback was, Wow. I didn’t think that it would really give me so much information, and open up also at the customer side, the willingness to consider new ideas, new ways of working together, that’s kind of the standard, the default experience, which, of course, came rather As a pleasant surprise. Another surprise was, and I’m doing this always with great pleasure and enthusiasm when I am called to facilitate the discussion between a supplier and a customer, usually, at some point it really gets to a deep dive where the customer says, hold on and and openly addresses their surprise that the supplier comes up with a more honest approach than they were. They were expecting, and more than once, I heard, hey guys, you are sellers. You shouldn’t tell us all your weaknesses. You’re supposed to lie to us, because you shouldn’t tell us all that you should, you should play to your strengths, and then we negotiate. But that is trust building, because if you then look at this framework again, which we had advocate with, this planning execution resource level, then you can use it, not only as a diagnostic tool, but also as an action framework. So in the same lens of analysis, nine building blocks or instruments in the dashboard allow you to really understand what’s going on in this relationship, but not only diagnose it, but also develop the actions. How do I go forward? It’s little bit like a man made GPS for for the business relationship. So that’s that’s the second surprise. And the third, I think, was when we analyzed the data, because at the beginning we didn’t have a lot of cases, but now our database is 10,000 cases, and growing, we looked at the patterns. And then, of course, when you apply a statistics statistical analysis, you can check for some hypothesis. And one was, the better you do, the better you perform in this triple fit context, the higher your performance should be. And we took the so called share of wallet as an indicator for business success. So am I the only. The sole supplier or a single source for the customer, or are Am I just one of many? Am I a vendor among 20 others? And then your share of wallet can be almost zero or zero, then you have no business, or 100 which is you get all of the customer spending for the products and services you can sell, and anything in between. And we hypothesized a linear relationship, so more is more, and then you have the two axis, x and y, and on the x axis you have the triple fit performance as rated by the customer, and on the y axis, you have the share of wallet, and it would be a linear correlation. The better you do in triple fit, the higher your share of wallet is. To our great surprise, the data was not behaving. The data showed not this linear correlation, but it kind of gave us an S curve, which means that you need to have a certain solid performance level before you can expect the relationship really, to take off. That’s not new news to all the experienced sales professionals, but it’s a very important insight which is often forgotten when business leaders come into play. Sales Professional at the frontline know, I cannot change a lousy, lower rated relationship overnight. I need to fix a few things. But the sales leaders just see, okay, there is a potential. And now, why don’t you do that? Kris, if you’re doing such a bad job because the products are good, it’s you No. It’s not the sales reps problem. It’s the mindset of the business leader who doesn’t understand this S curve correlation, and that’s why we developed this, also as a tool for senior leaders to kind of map the portfolio of their customers in this, what we call booster zone grid, where the most interesting zone is where the S curve takes off, and there is, of course, then where, where the rubber hits the road, where sales leaders should also then say, these are the accounts where we invest in. And it also puts an obligation on the frontline teams who need to come back and say, Okay, we’ve got this investment proposal with a little bit of performance. We’re creating a 2x or a 3x growth for the right account. And the last I would also say, more pleasant side effect was that we started seeing this also as an early warning system, because there are relationships where you have a wonderful high share of wallet, but the trip effect ratings are low, which means nothing else this relationship is in danger, and your strategy is not just go on and be successful and hope for the best. No, you have to protect it and turn it around. So, in fact, we’re working at two levels, and that is what I think was also a little bit of surprise. What we started with as a simple framework for analysis and action at the single relationship level, turned more and more into an strategy supporting tool, which is also important when you look at how companies execute their strategy, because it all boils down to another question, How valid is your strategy? Is it a customer validated approach, or is it just the obvious assumptions from a product and a geography perspective? The one dimension which is missing is the customer. So triple fit strategy also brings the customer into the game and kind of helps companies to also consider the customer guidance in a completely new way. I hope this gives a little bit then an idea of all the surprises we had, and of course, there were a few more.

Kris Safarova 24:21
Thank you so much for sharing. So for companies wanting to make this shift, what is a common first challenge they will face in shifting to this model, and how should leaders listening to us right now, address it?

Christoph Senn 24:34
It’s not one way. It depends a little bit on the situation. Are you talking to an individual sales professional who is charged with running the company’s most important customer relationship, for example? Then, of course, our advice is just go forward full force. And do what we call first maturity check of the relationship. You involve your customer early on, and then run the what we call five process steps of the triple fit process. And you work in 90 day cycles, which means you also have to be patient and allow then the teams on both sides to execute on what we call quick wins, and three months is a reasonable time span, then to go forward and check again, so it kind of is synchronized with what you would call quarterly business reviews as a decent approach in well run businesses. If it’s a higher order or higher level perspective, I got this number of customers from an industry perspective or a market segment perspective, then of course, you want to think about how you can test it. I usually say pilot it, and do not go into a full scale implementation, because you still need people who execute that. This is not a mechanical approach, where you can hire a group of smart individuals who will perform an analysis, hand it over to you, and then it’s once and done. This is an ongoing journey which also involves senior leaders, and usually there I would start with the senior management team. I would ask them a couple of questions related to how they interact with customers, and that’s also an interesting chapter in the book where we run a study with more than 600 business relationships, and we asked the senior leaders, how many times do you see customers? And of course, the answers were all over the place. And said, Okay, I’m seeing customers all the time. What do you mean? And I’m seeing them at trade shows and meet and greet and so but that’s not the quality we were looking for. We then asked their account managers and the customers, and they said, Oh, Kristof never saw him. He kind of must have hidden in the ivory tower, in his at his CEO level. So the truth is that you also need the senior leaders, at least one, and that’s my advice. You need one person who can really start changing the game and lead by example and become that growth champion we are also talking about in the book, who then creates the favorable conditions for the success, also at the single business relationship level. But I would say, Just do it, try it out with a handful of customers or with your one relationship, and then you will gradually see where you can kind of replicate it or scale it up. So rather a focused, prudent approach, not too fast, but of course, also not too slow. But step by step is definitely better than a big bang approach, because it really takes time to unlearn. Also some of these product market fit behavior, which not criticizing it, but we’re still observing in in many of the existing sales methodologies. It’s just more of the same. That’s also how I was trained. My sales force was trained, features, functions, benefits, value proposition. And here, sign the contract, please. That’s no longer how the game is played today. It’s it’s not this transactional negotiation style today. It’s all about orchestrating growth, not that negotiations will go away. But you can use your negotiation skills for discussing more valuable and more growth oriented topics.

Kris Safarova 29:18
That is very true. Could you talk us through. How do you perform the relationship maturity check?

Christoph Senn 29:23
Sure the relationship maturity check goes back to these 10 questions, which I was mentioning here at the beginning. In fact, it’s something which we invite every business professional to consider for at least their top five or top 10 customers, start with asking this question, what’s going on in this relationship? How many performance stars would you give us? 1234, or five? Five is the maximum. That’s an easy. A icebreaker question. And then you go through all these building blocks, from strategy to relationships down to solutions, processes, systems, people, structures and knowledge all the way through. And usually it’s a simple procedure. You just invite your customer and say, Okay, today I’m not going to talk about my products or the pricing. This is another discussion, but today, I would like to hear your opinion on how well we do our job to make you more successful. And these 10 questions help, and I will come back, and we will discuss the result. What you do then? And I think this is where most classic methods of customer satisfaction service stop. You’re not just analyzing the results all by yourself. You go back to the customer, and we had that case often, brave account manager. She was taking over the relationship in Brazil with Natura cosmetics, well known brand here, of course, especially in South America. And she tried to invite the customer to a workshop, and the customer said, Ah, it’s not the right time, and we have to wait. But her duty was turn around this relationship. So when we discussed her approach, she had a very smart idea, and said, Okay, could I replace the workshop where I would bring together my cross functional team and the customer’s cross functional team. Could I replace this with one to one interviews? And I said, Sure, why don’t you do that? Just pick up the phone or get on a zoom or a teams call and ask these 10 questions. Sometimes she saved these 10 questions before customer was filling it out 10 minutes, and they had a discussion basis. She did about a dozen interviews, and finally, she compiled the data and saw a pattern. By putting all them the answers together, she saw identified two areas out of the nine building blocks which were really high priority for the customer. So she went back to the decision maker at the customer and said, You know what? You said, it’s not time for the workshop, but I think it’s time to talk about these two topics. Oh, wow. Where did you get that from? Well, that was the essence from the interviews, and with this information and and confirmation, the customer agreed to a workshop, and that took off. And I think, if I remember correctly, they identified about 100 million more potential of business for natura, not that the supplier was only benefiting, it was then really helping the customer to identify new, untapped market potential. Imagine what this this means also for your positioning as a supplier, you are becoming the business developer for your customer, and that is far more than I’m just dealing with another supplier. Definitely,

Kris Safarova 33:19
you’re becoming a partner. Yes, relationship,

Christoph Senn 33:23
exactly.

Kris Safarova 33:25
Do you work with B to C companies as well, or only B to B?

Christoph Senn 33:29
It’s a question. How you define B to C?

Kris Safarova 33:33
Well, B to B, the customer you are serving is something like Coca Cola or another business, and you’re working with the business B to C, you’re working with individuals.

Christoph Senn 33:41
I think it’s, it’s a two fold answer. First of all, at the beginning, there is B to B to B to B to C. In the end, just a matter of how many steps in the value chain you have. What we usually cover is everything, but the very last mile. When you and I go into a Walmart or a Tesco or a car for shop or a 711 it’s not about us being marketed to, and we grab this candy bar over the other or the Oreo cookies instead of kit cut or whatever. But we work with all the companies before that steps. So even Coca Cola. Your Coca Cola, of course, cola is a little bit the complex organization with the mother company in Atlanta, and then the bottling companies, and then, of course, the retailers, which serve as a main distribution channel, or an important distribution channel. So you have to orchestrate that all, but it’s all business to business, because we are not buying directly from the bottling company as endpoint. Consumers. So as Coca Cola or as the bottler, you want to make sure that your products are prominently placed at the shelves of Walmart or of any other retailer, Costco, just to name a few. So this is all business to business with an idea to go together to market and have the end consumer in focus and in the book, we also describe the example of the, I would say, textbook type, relationship between Walmart and Procter and Gamble. PNG is the supplier in that case, and Walmart the customer. And what started as an adversarial relationship turned into a truly collaborative partnership, but it took a long time. It’s not to our merits that this happened. This was done by one of my mentors. I have to give credits to Tom Bucha, all that he’s a natural talent, and he’s really one of these role models who can certainly develop and execute things even without triple feet. But what about all the others you need? You want to have a certain guidance a framework. It’s also like comparable when you when you start playing golf, most people need to take a lesson or two, or have to analyze a certain Swing pattern, or just observe how others are doing it, or get some advice. And this is where we why we have built that framework, just to make the life easier and more successful. But back to the B to B and B to C question. In fact, it’s also interesting from a research perspective, more than, I would say, 70 or 80% of today’s any day’s transactions are business to business, and that is often what is forgotten. Also when you teach sales at the university level, it’s all about the new marketing concept from Nike or Adidas or Coca Cola, but B to B is still the dominating force, and it’s more B to B than B to C. And I think this is also one of the missions we have to make sure that B to B gets proper recognition and also can catch up, also from a tool and framework perspective,

Kris Safarova 37:40
Kristof, and for our listeners who are listening right now and thinking what kind of common attributes a leader will need to have to successfully implement what you’re teaching. And you mentioned earlier that two levels, there’s someone who is managing the customer relationship and someone who is sponsoring customer relationship. What would be your reply?

Christoph Senn 37:59
I would stick with this duality. It needs both. It’s like in an orchestra, you want to have a conductor, and the conductor is usually that person who brings together multiple roles and functions for a perfect experience like you listen to a symphony orchestra, of course, there are a few solists. Sometimes it’s also feeling a little bit like hurting casts working or working with this prima donna or that talented musician, but the conductor brings it all together, even though she or he doesn’t make any sound, right? But you need to have clarity on what will happen when, and that is what we call the orchestrators, those people who are really at the center stage and bringing together different functions in their company together with the customer. So connecting the two organizations at these three levels, planning, execution and resource feed. But any orchestra even led by the most talented conductor, needs favorable conditions. So there is a management, there are sponsors, there are boards, and there are, of course, the investors, and they also say so you need to also make sure that your executive level is on board, and that is where you need these growth champions who certainly have special characteristics. These need to be people who are, first of all, are putting the customer at the center stage of all they do, I think they should really live up to the principal. How we or how we define customer centricity, it’s orchestrating all your company’s activities for your target customer success at the profit, which means we’re not doing things just because we want them to be run like that. We are listening to the customer, and we are doing what we can not to say yes to every customer request, but we try to partner with the customer in a new way to create favorable conditions for both sides. Of course, this requires a huge level of trust, but that’s why these growth champions, as we call them, they work on two dimensions. One is the relationship building. So these people should really also meet and see and frequently engage with customers, but also care about the business. So they should also help every now and then to secure a deal. So it’s not just one or the other role. If you just perform the relationship part, you’re kind of more a social visitor, which is completely neglecting in the worst case, the business side, you just do the pleasant stuff, the the wine and dine task. On the other hand, you can also act as a deal maker. I just come in when I sign the contract or need to turn around the relationship, that’s a pure deal maker behavior, and I couldn’t care less about the relationship I’m in and out. That is also not what customers expect. So they expect performance on both dimensions. So growth champions are equally important as these orchestrators. And maybe back to the orchestrators for one one more thing, it really matters how you define your role. Am I just a vendor who is trained in a product or service approach, and I go out and never take no for an answer. Fine, then you create 1x value because you you’re good at your job, and you do it well enough that every now and then a customer buys it, but they also happily switch to another attractive vendor anytime but if you turn to become an orchestrator, you are starting to help the customer to make more get more mileage out of the relationship, so your Efforts shift from negotiating better to advising the customer at a different level. Have you thought about this? Or we see that you’re losing money here? I did this analysis and that that reminds me of one case, if I may, where a a customer was challenging one of my clients and said, Okay, you’re already good, but if you want to differentiate yourself as a supplier, help us grow in Asia. That is a call to action, because it’s no longer about I need your product at half the price. I need your business advice to perform better in a key region with potential. What’s your answer going to be? And that is, of course, then the choice where we say, okay, you better want to have a broader perspective, triple fit instead of okay. I may have these three products which serve your Asian market.

Kris Safarova 43:38
The last question I wanted to ask you about this topic is with the clients that you have that were most successful. What did they do differently?

Christoph Senn 43:50
I think they, at some point in time, sooner or later, went all in they said, Yes, we could go on with our standard playbooks, standard approaches, and create this amount of value, maybe here. But if we look now what happened with our triple fit powered accounts, we see that the level of performance is already here. So what do we want to have in the future, this level or this and all in means that they would decide about a new standard how they design and and execute and maintain their business relationships, and then also constantly monitor and reinvent these and create the favorable conditions and invest, of course, and we were fortunate, of course, to have companies doing the performance analysis. For us, it’s not us then running the data, but the customers, because we always advise you don’t have to do triple fit for all your accounts, select a random number, and then we call these the triple fit account, and then you have the rest, which is the control group. And every three months, we check where we are, and once per year we do a maturity check. And usually over two three years, you see a huge delta. So it’s a matter of industry, of course, how big that delta is in financial absolute figures, but percentage wise, you can easily say in three years, you double those accounts where you really go deep and all in.

Kris Safarova 45:45
And the last question I wanted to ask for today is the favorite question of mine to ask, and that is, over the last few years, what were two, three aha moments, realizations that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

Christoph Senn 46:02
I would say two things. First, you cannot plan for everything but be ready for what life offers you. And sometimes I have to say, this is what probably the higher power in heaven is deciding and not us. That is, that is my, my essence, and the other is, of course, when I was observing all these brave sales professionals at the front line. I’m always amazed how how much outcome is is generated, how much results come when people relentlessly pursue that holistic approach and say, Okay, I know there is more value, and I will not rest until it is unblocked to make my customer successful. So that that circles back to that, that very first example I was giving to you, if you happen to come across such a situation where somebody is really showing an incredibly high performance. Don’t be shy to ask how they do it. And that’s how I could learn and profit a lot, because these people, they will not hold back, they will not keep it as a secret, because they know already what they’re doing. And I think this is also what keeps me going? There are so many great people out there you can learn from. So the journey never stops. It’s fascinating.

Kris Safarova 47:50
Kristof, thank you so much. Where can our listeners learn more about you? By your book? Anything you want to share,

Christoph Senn 47:55
of course, if you are interested, then the book is available at any of the book sellers, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all the likes in the US or rest of the world. If you want to learn more and also get access to some free tools, visit our website, triple fit strategy.com so the same title as the book, triple fit strategy.com and of course, if you are interested to have a personal conversation on how you may also want to upskill your team, or maybe run a benchmark study or get advice how you can validate your corporate strategy. You can find us at value creator.com which is our implementation platform. These are the contact addresses. Thank you,

Kris Safarova 48:58
Kris, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here and being so generous with sharing your work and your advice. Thank you. Was a pleasure. Our guest today, again has been Kristof Sen. Check out his book. It’s called triple fit strategy. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG being in resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume. PDF. Thank you again, everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.