The best companies in the world consider what their customers need ahead of everything else.
Inc. content contributor Bill Murphy once pasted every word of Jeff Bezos’ 23 shareholder letters during his time as Amazon CEO into a word cloud generator. The most popular word by far was mentioned roughly 25 per cent more than the company’s own name. The word was customer.
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”
Jeff Bezos, Owner and Founder of Amazon
In B2B, moulding a value proposition around customer needs is perhaps more difficult due to the idiosyncrasies that make every business different.
But, at Procure Smart, our leadership’s experience of more than a decade in B2B contracts and more than 40,000 switches gives us exceptional insight into the needs and desires our customers.
It is this knowledge which has led to the creation of the business’ development roadmap, featuring new products and new technology to give our customers more power to control business costs.
Craig Shields, Managing Director at Procure Smart, has explained the business’ approach to doing more for UK businesses of all sizes.
He said: “We are certainly looking to do things differently over the next 12 to 18 months.
“We have successfully established the business with excellent routes to market, strong processes and a future-focused structure since beginning trading at the start of 2023.
“The bottom line is that we can now add real value to businesses of any size with the expertise and systems we hold internally. The next step is to develop something which we hope will disrupt the marketplace.
“The starting point had to be to understand our customers as well as possible.
“We decided to build our own bespoke internal CRM system, which is currently being rolled out. This will give us more intelligence on our customers’ statuses in a fast, automated way. In turn, this will reduce the burden on internal account managers and allow us to provide more value to our customers.
“This was an early priority for us. Having this holistic view of our customers can be leveraged commercially and used to provide industry leading customer service.
“We have now launched our renewables division and have quickly built a design pipeline of more than 15MW of low-carbon solutions for businesses across the country. This feeds nicely on from knowing our customers innately and holding actionable data in our CRM. We can identify those who will benefit from renewables quickly and accurately.
“A key goal for this division is to help educate businesses on how accessible solar has now become. The recent energy price crisis has made supply security and volatility mitigation extremely important considerations for businesses with larger consumptions. Coupled with popular new funding options and Power Purchase Agreements (PPA), we believe the true advent of solar power is arriving in the UK.
“The most potentially disruptive part of our 2024 development is a new web-based application allowing businesses to complete contract switches completely digitally.
“There are various versions of this currently online, but we have seen in the past that there is a customer desire to run comparisons and switches themselves, in the same way they do their domestic contracts.
“We are looking to release a product which is as close as possible to this expectation. The build is now underway with a newly-appointed partner and we are excited to release something we believe will positively affect the non-domestic market in the UK. We will reveal more information on this as the project progresses to testing.
“We have a very exciting, fast-paced year ahead and we will need more talent within the business to help us achieve our goals.
“We are now recruiting for capable sales and business development professionals to expand our customer base and take these thrilling developments to a wider range of UK businesses.”
Craig Shields, Managing Director, Procure Smart
