Power of People: Toro’s Perspective on multi-dimensional relationships

On October 28, BMA-Minnesota was very fortunate to have one of Minnesota’s leading brands — The Toro Company — take us “behind the curtain” to get a glimpse of the secret to their success.

Michael Happe, V.P. and General Manager of Toro’s Commercial Division, shared how Toro leverages the breadth and depth of the company’s industry relationships that drive innovation and customer loyalty. As a follow-up to his presentation, Happe graciously agreed to bring the discussion to the B2B Backroom blog.

Every company understands that “people” are one of the key ingredients to their ability to succeed in their marketplace. Most companies refer to their people as their most valuable resources, but employees are only one of the relationship dimensions (i.e. groups of people) that impact the decisions that get made in the marketplace. 

At Toro, we might argue that the collective strength of your relationships with Employees, Channel Partners, Customers, Vendors, Industry Experts, Media, and other groups vis-a-vie your competition is strongly correlated to your ability to innovate, to command a price premium and to maintain high levels of customer loyalty.  We believe that it is these strong relationships that have allowed The Toro Company to build and hold high market share positions in most of our served markets.  Moreover, strong relationships have a less tangible, yet equally important impact in terms of word-of-mouth advocacy for future sales.

Multi-dimensional relationships are critical to every businesses success, but few companies take a strategic or methodical approach to how their investments in both time and money are deployed in support of ongoing relationship development.

By analyzing who the primary decision makers are for your business and by mapping out who they listen to when making their purchase decisions, you can quickly see where relevant relationships need to be funded, nurtured, and measured.  As the strength and breadth of these relationships grow over time, so – too – will your business successes (assuming that you’re selling a good, high quality product or service).  You will have deeper customer insight, learn about trends and key issues faster, and be better positioned for every sale!

For many businesses, it is very difficult to justify spending valuable marketing resources on the many buyer groups that have a direct influence on your sale.  It is even more challenging to fund initiatives with groups of people who may never purchase your product, yet, it is often these indirect relationships that have the most impact on, and credibility with, the buyers.

Strong relationships do not happen over night.  The multi-dimensional relationship business model must always be active to build a strong “social network” of advocates that touch your customers.  With that said, this investment is, perhaps, the most difficult thing for any competitor to replicate.  In short, healthy multi-dimensional relationships can be the biggest barrier to entry that you or your customers face!  Easy to say, hard to do!

Based on our experience, we would certainly encourage other companies (other than our competitors) to take investment in these multi-dimensional relationships seriously.  Start with your own organization and build an environment of mutual respect.  Invest first in the relationships that are most closely coupled to your customers and continue to extend your relationship reach (social network) to other key influencers.  Invest both time and money in these relationships.  Any competitor can write a check to sponsor some advocacy group but only the market leader will invest both money and their time (and passion) into long term relationships that will continue to pay dividends for years to come.

Michael Happe
V.P. and General Manager - Commercial Division
Toro Company