The following are examples of real-world scenarios that paved the way for the BRM role at three different companies. This is a companion white-paper to The Case for BRM: A Practical Framework for Your CEO Conversation. Use this document to guide your BRM Capabilities business case. Each of the following scenarios leverages field research to gain insight into each company’s challenges. This approach illuminates the roadblocks that negatively impact customer engagement, as well as the associated investments needed to overcome them. While the scenarios below do not cover all of the in-depth stages involved in building your case for BRM, they do highlight the essential aspects of field research and discovery—one of the most important skills a BRM must have in their toolbox.

Before we jump into the scenarios, take a moment to review the four stages of building your BRM business case below:

1. Stage 1 – Preparation – The first step is make sure you are emotionally and mentally ready for the journey. It won’t always be easy; expect roadblocks and setbacks. Visit with external customers and discover their pain points. Understand the company strategy and gain perspective on how your company must compete to win in the future.
2. Stage 2 – Planning the Conversation – In this stage, take the information you gathered in the preparation stage and begin to formulate your strategy. Answer this question: why BRM for your company? Weave the real-world stories you experienced firsthand in the field into your message. Connect the dots on strategy and explain how relieving the pain points you discovered will help the company grow. Formulate your success metrics.
3. Stage 3 – Framing the Message – Here you begin to frame the pitch. What problem(s) do you plan to solve? How will you solve them, what does the BRM function look like, and how will you define success? Keep this message concise and to the point — no embellishing. Use the “less is more” approach.
4. Stage 4 – Pre-Selling Techniques – Practice your pitch before closing the deal. Look for allies and dissenters. Use feedback from these sessions to sharpen your message. Look to mentors for help and guidance.

Scenario One – A Day in the Life

Background

A middle market accounting firm was working through numerous challenges driven by acquisitions, high employee turnover, and regulatory changes. The company was the largest of its kind in its market segment. It had a new leadership team and growth was the company’s primary goal. The CIO of the company had just been hired as their first CIO.

Service Provider Perceptions Abound

IT was considered by most partners in the firm as a service provider, nothing more than the dial-tone group and help desk. To overcome this tired perception, the company’s CIO decided to get out in the field with emerging BRMs to observe the challenges faced by both employees and customers firsthand. The team visited more than twenty cities, targeting audit engagements around the country and engaging with employees and customers.

What they discovered was profound: they saw audit rooms filled with old laptops, cables, cords, and paper. They heard customers say, “Wow, what a mess! How do these folks get anything done with all that clutter?” The team witnessed failing, outdated technology and frustrated audit teams trying to reboot and recover lost work. Most importantly, they heard straight from employees how they felt. Here are some examples of what employees said (for more, see chapter six of IT Business Partnerships: A Field Guide):

• Auditor Leader: “People talk as though we are falling behind. We already have.”
• Firm Partner #1: “We’ve lost deals because we haven’t been able to respond to proposals on the road.”
• Firm Partner #2: “The most frustrating part of my job is spending three to four hours a day messing with technology.”
• Customer: “This company seems so far behind the times.”
• Firm Partner #3: “It is no wonder we are losing people to our competitors. Their technology is so much better than ours.”

The CIO and BRM team returned from their trip armed with a wealth of information—most notably, company pain points from the perspective of end-customers and employees. There was almost too much information to process and succinctly communicate. Recognizing there was an opportunity to make meaningful change, and not wanting to waste any of it, the CIO engaged a reputable coach who had experience building business cases and successfully implementing BRM capabilities at other companies.

The CIO and BRM coach used the field research results to orchestrate an event called “A Day in the Life.” Prior to the event, they rehearsed their pitch and then finally invited the executive team to take a walk through a day in the life of a customer and employee conducting a typical audit engagement. To maximize the impact of their message, the team showcased their research findings by using pictures and storytelling.

Pictures and Storytelling

After presenting pictures and quotes from the field highlighting the newfound pain points, the team shared ideas on how to solve the problems and offered a glimpse of what the future might look like once the pain points were eliminated. Starring into the harsh reality of the pain points, the CEO and the executive team were definitely surprised. When the CIO and the BRM team asked for funding, the CEO immediately and enthusiastically answered yes! Later, when asked why, the CEO replied, “I had no idea the amount of pain our customers and employees were feeling. I am embarrassed by this and we have no choice but to fix it.”

In this scenario, field research and storytelling helped the executive team feel the customer’s and employee’s pain. This was the magic moment that funded the BRM program at this company. See IT Business Partnerships: A Field Guide for specifics on how use the storytelling approach to deliver results.

Scenario Two – Time for a Reboot

Background

There are times when it pays to roll BRM programs out slowly. This scenario begins with a long-time manufacturer/retailer that hadn’t changed its go-to-market strategy in decades. The company faced a rapidly changing marketplace, and digital commerce platforms were springing up overnight. This company had relied heavily on its brick-and-mortar retail platform for most of its history. They were challenged with adapting to the new market while trying to maintain the personalized service for which they were famous.

Seeing is Believing

The CIO decided to take her newly-formed BRM/IT Business Partner team into the field. They spent time in retail stores with B2B and end-customers, observing all the forms of technology they used to conduct business. The team canvassed the country; listening, observing, and digesting all that they could. With this firsthand knowledge, they developed a clearer picture of how to help their company adapt. However, they knew that change wasn’t going to be easy for the company. With a decades-long tradition of success, getting people to suddenly listen to a radically new go-to-market strategy probably wouldn’t be the most appropriate tactic to start their BRM journey.

Quick Wins

Instead, the team highlighted a few quick wins that demonstrated how BRMs connect with customers (B2B, B2B2C, and B2C) and solve problems without breaking the bank. In one example, the team observed end-customers in retail stores getting frustrated when what they wanted was not in stock at a particular store. The team witnessed the end-customer standing on one side of the counter, while the store manager stood on the other side and busily crafted an email to all stores across the country. In the email, the store manager asked if any other store had this product in stock, and if they would be willing to ship the product to their customer. Both parties had to wait for an answer—and this was in 2009, no less.

As you can imagine, the end-customers were surprised that they couldn’t receive a faster, more automatic answer. The problem was that the store managers were so used to this approach, they didn’t even think to complain. It is surprising what field research dredges up.  It takes an outsider’s perspective to see a seemingly obvious solution and recommend a low-cost fix. End-customers in this scenario left store not knowing when and where their orders would be fulfilled, but the CIO and BRM team were not aware of this issue until they went directly into the field. It was then obvious to them that since product inventory was in a database already, a simple query could inform the store manager of each store’s inventory details. Armed with that information, store managers would now only need to place a call to that store—no email blast necessary.

Lasting Impact

The team quickly built a simple query function that store managers then used to search for inventory. The new solution revealed the inventory of each store in real-time, as well as the store manager’s name, phone number, and email address. This simple solution resulted in the most positive impact felt across the retail network in many years, which greatly enhanced the IT organization’s reputation. The retail team buzzed for more than a year about this function’s impact on their customer service.

The afterglow of this success gave the CIO an open invitation to do more. She implemented other similar, low-hanging fruit solutions—small projects that cost little but had big impact. This paved the way for a bigger, broader initiative that drove full BRM program implementation and an Omni-channel commerce program. You may also find that developing small, low-cost wins in your company will generate confidence and trust, and open the door to a full BRM program.

Scenario Three – Changing Perspectives

Background

What if your team was perceived as a strategic partner and ally? What would it take to make that happen? Where would you even start? These are the questions that one business leader faced when trying to revamp her organization from one that was known as a mere service provider, to one that was perceived as a business ally and trusted partner. In the past, she tried a broader-scale, company-wide awareness program, but for most, the promise of a new program that featured better business results and tighter collaboration seemed too good to be true. The initiative was met with resistance and doubt. People from around the company had a hard time believing that her team could be something more than just the operating group that had served them in the past.

Regrouping and Relaunching Pays Off

The CIO regrouped and decided to seek mentorship from an experienced BRM coach. She found a seasoned mentor with a reputation for successfully implementing business-driven BRM capabilities using pragmatic tools and methods. The CIO and her coach determined that the company needed to see tangible results before anyone would take the partnership agenda seriously. Realizing this, they decided to stop program email blasts, mothball the t-shirts, buttons, and balloons from their grand program, and shift gears to a simpler one.

The CIO then launched a more low-key, less grandiose BRM program. As a first step, she and her coach re-examined the company’s top challenges by looking at the broader market landscape and zeroing in on the critical factors that impacted the company’s performance. They realized that they were making things too hard with the bigger program, which was made clear when they listened to the executive team talk about the pain points they faced.

The company faced the challenge of slow revenue growth and increasing cost-of-goods sold. The market as a whole was contracting, and inventories were increasing. As a result, inventory turns were slowing to unprecedented levels, and working capital became the major focus of the management team. Inventory forecasts were managed largely on spreadsheets, much like they had been in the past. The BRMs immediate reaction was, “Surely a better solution has been developed in the decades since Excel was invented?”

Bi-lingual IT and Business Expertise

The BRM team had certified demand planners in their group. With their bi-lingual IT and business knowledge, they knew that there were better tools on the market capable of delivering demand plans that would reduce working capital by getting inventory levels right. They collaborated with the supply chain team and built a business case that had a payback of less than 36 months. They received approval to proceed with the development, implemented the program, and drove meaningful bottom-line results – saving the company more than $4 million annually on cash outlays for inventory.

From an IT perspective, implementing the new software and integrating it into the warehouse management system was relatively easy. The problem was that like many business units, the supply chain team wasn’t able to see the opportunity at hand without BRMs to bridge the gap. Fortunately, the new BRM team’s involvement didn’t stop there. The supply chain executive, a C-suite member, was so impressed by the collaboration that he asked the BRM team to build a comprehensive roadmap aimed at addressing other operational pain points, which was music to the CIO’s ears.

“Show-Me” Delivers the Win

Needless to say, the CIO accepted the challenge and her BRM team created a 24-month investment roadmap powered by IT that promised better customer service, stronger inventory management, and improved pick-pack-and-ship speed and accuracy. Word spread about the new BRM capabilities impacting the supply chain performance. The other business executives soon began paying attention and soon HR, Finance, Sales, and the other teams asked to get in line for their own BRM team.

This is a true story and it proves that starting small with one targeted group can yield long-term benefits. Starting small and delivering real results made this “show-me” company a believer.

Summary

The scenarios above are real. In each case, these teams followed the four stages of building their business case. First, they used field research and firsthand knowledge to formulate their case. Then, they connected the dots by making sure each investment proposal spoke to one or more of the company’s strategic imperatives. Most importantly, they never proposed investments that weren’t well-researched, internally test driven, and powerfully communicated.

When you follow these guidelines, the majority of investments you propose will be approved, and they will drive bottom-line results. Not only does your company benefit financially from these practices, but you will too. You’ll see your career flourish as you develop a reputation for being a business leader who consistently delivers measurable, bottom-line value. This is the power of Business Relationship Management capabilities.

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2015 CIO Mentor, LLC – Published for Use by BRM Institute