Customer Management Skills
This first stage of the CustMaS project aimed to explore the state-of-the-art knowledge of customer management skills in digitalizing B2B markets.
From a thorough literature review and job advertisement analysis, we delivered a list of current B2B customer management skills with definitions. These are necessary skills that have been studied and mentioned either by researchers or practitioners. Additionally, this phase provided a list of skills that are being taught in top graduate programs in Europe. This output represented a basis for future stages of the CustMaS project.
The result of this intellectual output highlights the lack of a comprehensive programme of study of B2B customer management skills in digital transformation. Besides, though a wide range of B2B sales skills has been covered in European graduate education, there are still missing skills that are found important in this digital transformation era, such as learning agility, e-negotiation, or stress management. Therefore, the upcoming stages of CustMaS projects are important in that they will offer a qualitatively and quantitatively investigated list of skills and an effective program to teach those skills in higher education in Europe.
The second phase of this project will build on the list of customer management skills and run interviews with salespeople from best practice B2B companies. The objective of the interviews will be to explore (1) currently important skills that have not been mentioned in the previous phase and (2) future skills that are predicted to be crucial in digital transformation by practitioners.
After the second phase, the final list of skills will be delivered and used as input for the third phase to quantitatively validate the skill model by a survey. Later, a curriculum to educate customer management skills will be developed, tested, and refined. Finally, a Massive Open Online Course will be implemented.
The results of intellectual output 1 are presented in a white paper that can be downloaded here.