Kamran Kashani, a professor of Marketing and Global Strategy at Switzerland's IMD business School, offers a few key imperatives to guide companies as they develop their customer initiatives. Among them:

Grasp the Moment: A break with the past is never easy, but it's a lot easier when standing on a burning platform. In many customer-focused turnarounds, the management began the journey facing an impending crisis, one that forced the organization to search for novel ways of serving its customers. IBM's combined $13 billion loss in 1992-93, the largest in its long history, was a compelling signal that a clean break from its insular ways was overdue. The new management exploited this organization-wide realization to push through a new vision that tied the success of the company to ways of making customers successful in their businesses. But managers need not wait until the entire house is on fire before raising the alarm. Anticipating a future crisis, they are well advised to grasp the opportunity that comes with increments of bad news to raise the sense of urgency and to prod and prepare their organization for the unavoidable change.

Organize Around Segments: The right structure can be an immense help in implementing a customer-intimate strategy. At IBM, to facilitate the acquisition of sector knowledge needed for its newly adopted solutions strategy, the management re-drew the organization chart thereby creating 12 divisions, each looking after an end-user cluster (banking; government; insurance; distribution; etc.).The new structure replaced a product-based organization that was no longer relevant or even comprehensible to its customers. The power of organizing around customer segments lies in assembling under one roof the often internally scattered customer expertise, and in crafting strategies that exploit deep insights into each segment's business.

Choose Your Customers: Getting intimate with customers is a selective process: not all potential accounts deserve or qualify for it. Put differently, the high cost to align and serve the chosen accounts must be more than compensated by the additional profit streams directly attributed to such undertaking. That criterion alone suggests that the current volumes of business are probably less important in targeting customers than their future profitability. Other factors to consider include a fit between the company's strategic ambitions and those of the customer, a readiness to invest in joint programs for shared benefits, and more than a minimum level of mutual trust between the two management teams.

Follow Through: If a single variable could explain the difference between success and failure in customer intimacy, that variable would be the qualities of top management's leadership in follow through. It's the top management that defines the logic and sets the agenda for a customer-focused strategy. It's also those at the helm who have to shape and steer the organization in the unchartered waters as gaps between ambitions and reality become evermore apparent. In deciding to refocus the strategic agenda, they have embarked on a major change program that would continue to require their active involvement with the entire process over a good stretch of time.