Читать книгу A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services - Valerie Mathieu - Страница 20

ZEBOX is an international incubator-accelerator of innovative start-ups, located in Marseille, specialized in the transport, logistics, mobility and Industry 4.0 sectors.

Entrepreneurs are strongly committed to the development of their innovation in order to confirm the existence of a market, to demonstrate the adequacy between the latter and their offer and to attract customers. Their ability to do so will be a determining factor in their entrepreneurial success.

Nevertheless, there are several types of entrepreneurs, including those who are more business-oriented and those who are more “techno”-oriented. The business-oriented profile launches itself into the creation of a company following different professional experiences, which led him to the observation of a non-optimal or even non-existent response to an observed problem. The projects carried by this type of profile are generally relatively well aligned with the satisfaction of a need. A second profile, which could be called “technologist”, develops a technological solution before specifying its potential on the market. The risk associated with such an approach is to see efforts pushed in a non-optimal direction because they do not address a real market problem.

A structure like ZEBOX, positioned on innovative projects, essentially dedicated to B2B, combines both types of profiles. In both cases, one of ZEBOX’s missions, supported by its corporate partners¹², is to help entrepreneurs better understand the markets in which they are evolving (or will evolve) with regard to their specificities and their assets. The support on the strategic aspect of the project will make it possible for them to take the necessary distance to confront the market and exchange with multiple profiles of potential customers. This exercise will be an opportunity for them to refine their value proposition, thus maximize their chances of meeting their market and eventually make the decision to pivot as soon as possible.

The transition from the incubation stage to the acceleration one validates a certain maturity in the customer orientation of the entrepreneur and the start-up. Incubation enables the identification of a first strategic client or a key partner in order to better structure an initial business model. Acceleration builds on this first step to move towards a more ambitious implementation that will make it possible to develop a first portfolio of customers. The evolution of the project during the incubation phase, and then its transition to acceleration, will be all the better if the entrepreneur is able to capitalize on the network to which the incubator/accelerator gives him/her access.

Finally, it can be assumed that there are employees in an organization who have a sort of natural customer orientation at an individual level. These employees can then serve as role models and influence the level of customer orientation of their colleagues or their team (Lam et al. 2010). Empirical studies have confirmed that a leader’s level of customer orientation influences the level of customer orientation of his or her colleagues (Liao and Subramony 2008), and this is particularly true in the context of sales management (Lam et al. 2010).