P&G understands that if its business customers don’t do well, neither will the company. To grow its own business, therefore, P&G must first grow the business of the retailers that sell its brands to final consumers. In P&G’s own words, “CBD is more than mere ‘selling’—it’s a P&G-specific approach which enables us to grow our business by working as a ‘strategic partner’ (as opposed to just a supplier) with those who ultimately sell our products to consumers.” Says one CBD manager, “We depend on them as much as they depend on us.” By partnering with each other, P&G and its customers create “win-win” relationships that help both to prosper.

Most P&G customers are huge and complex businesses—such as Walmart, Walgreens, or Dollar General—with thousands of stores and billions of dollars in revenues. Working with and selling to such customers can be a very complex undertaking, more than any single salesperson or regular sales team could accomplish. Instead, P&G assigns a full CBD team to every large customer account. Each CBD team contains not only salespeople but also a full complement of specialists in every aspect of selling P&G’s consumer brands at the retail level.

Teams vary in size depending on the customer. For example, it takes a team of 350 P&G specialists to properly serve Walmart, far and away its biggest customer. By contrast, the P&G Dollar General team consists of about 30 people. Regardless of size, every team constitutes a complete, multifunctional customer service unit. Each team includes a manager and several account executives (each responsible for a specific P&G product category), supported by specialists in marketing strategy, product development, operations, information systems, logistics, finance, and human resources.

To deal effectively with large accounts, P&G salespeople must be smart, well trained, and strategically grounded. They deal daily with high-level retail category buyers who may purchase hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of P&G and competing brands annually. It takes a lot more than a friendly smile and a firm handshake to interact with such buyers. Yet individual P&G salespeople can’t know everything. And because of the nature of P&G’s B-to-B interactions, they don’t have to. Instead, P&G salespeople have at hand all the resources they need to resolve even the most challenging customer problems. “I have everything I need right here,” says a household care account executive. “If my customer needs help from us with in-store promotions, I can go right down the hall and talk with someone on my team in marketing about doing some kind of promotional deal. It’s that simple.”

The multifunctional nature of the CBD team also means that collaboration extends far beyond internal interactions. Each time a team member contacts the customer, he or she represents the entire team. For example, if during a customer call an account executive receives a question about a promotional, logistical, or financial matter, the account executive acts as the liaison with the appropriate specialist. So, although not each CBD member has specialized knowledge in every area, the CBD team as a unit does.

Competitors have attempted to implement some aspects of P&G’s multifunctional approach. However, P&G pioneered the CBD structure. And it has built in some unique characteristics that have allowed it to leverage more power from its team structure than its rivals can, giving it real competitive advantage.

One of the things that gives P&G an edge when it comes to maintaining deep relationships with its business customers is a CBD structure that is broader and more comprehensive, making it more multifunctional than similar team structures employed by other companies. But perhaps more important, P&G’s structure is designed to accomplish four key objectives. These objectives are so important that they are referred to internally as the “core work” of customer development. These four objectives are:

• Align strategy: Create opportunities for both P&G and the ­customer to benefit by collaborating in strategy development.

• Create demand: Build profitable sales volume for P&G and the customer through consumer value and shopper satisfaction.

• Optimize supply: Maximize the efficiency of the supply chain from P&G to the point of purchase to optimize cost and ­responsiveness.

• Enable the organization: Develop capabilities to maximize business results by creating the capacity for frequent ­breakthrough.

More than just corporate catchphrases jotted down in a P&G employee handbook, for sales personnel, these are words to live by. P&G trains sales staff in methods of achieving each objective and evaluates their effectiveness relative to each. In fact, P&G’s customer relationship strategy came about through the recognition that to develop true win-win relationships with each customer, P&G would need to accomplish the first objective. As one account executive puts it, “The true competitive advantage is achieved by taking a multi-functional approach from basic selling to strategic customer collaboration!” If the CBD team can effectively accomplish the first objective of aligning strategy and collaborating on strategic development, accomplishing the other three objectives will follow more easily.

Building such strategic partnerships creates shopper value and satisfaction and drives profitable sales at the store level. When it comes to profitably moving Tide, Pampers, Gillette, or other P&G brands off store shelves and into consumers’ shopping carts, P&G reps and their teams often know more than the retail buyers they advise. In fact, P&G’s retail partners often rely on CBD teams to help them manage not only the P&G brands on their shelves but also entire product categories, including competing brands.

Giving advice on the stocking and placement of competitors’ brands as well as its own might seem unwise. But believe it or not, it happens all the time at P&G. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for a P&G rep to tell a retail buyer to stock fewer P&G products and more of a competing brand. Although that may seem like retail suicide, keep in mind that a CBD team’s primary goal is to help the customer win in each product category. Sometimes, analysis shows that the best solution for the customer is “more of the other guy’s product.” For P&G, that’s OK. The company knows that creating the best situation for the retailer ultimately pulls in more customer traffic, which in turn will likely lead to increased sales for other P&G products in the same category. Because most of P&G’s brands are market-share leaders, it stands to benefit more from the increased traffic than competitors do. Again, what’s good for the customer is good for P&G—it’s a win-win situation.

Honest and open dealings also help to build long-term customer relationships. P&G salespeople become trusted advisors to their retailer-partners, a status they work hard to maintain. “It took me four years to build the trust I now have with my buyer,” says a veteran P&G account executive. “If I talk her into buying P&G products that she can’t sell or out-of-stocking competing brands that she should be selling, I could lose that trust in a heartbeat.”

At P&G, collaboration is usually a two-way street—P&G gives and customers give back in return. “We’ll help customers run a set of commercials or do some merchandising events, but there’s usually a return-on-investment,” explains another CBD manager. “Maybe it’s helping us with distribution of a new product or increasing space for fabric care. We’re very willing if the effort creates value for us as well as for the customer and the final consumer.”

As a result of collaborating with customers, P&G receives as much or more than it gives.

For starters, P&G receives information that helps it to remain innovative and create better products. The collaborative nature of its customer relationships also allows for optimizing the product mix, which also optimizes revenue. And the kind of transparency that results from strategic partnerships enables P&G to remain efficient and keep costs low. Indeed, during the first decade of this millennium, P&G was flying high as revenues, profits, and stock price all maintained healthy growth.

But P&G’s strong performance flattened out as its vast portfolio of brands began showing a major weakness. Despite holding top positions in many product categories, many of P&G’s brands were small, poor performers, or both. This limited the growth and profitability of its stronger brands. So P&G undertook a major restructuring of its product portfolio. Over the past few years, P&G has sold off about 100 brands (including Duracell, Aleve, Noxema, Iams, Clairol, Wella, and Covergirl) in order to focus on the 65 strongest-performing brands (such as Crest, Bounty, Tide, Gillette, and Dawn, to name just a few). Although it may sound like P&G dumped a big chunk of the company, the 65 remaining brands have long been responsible for about 90 percent of total revenues and 95 percent of profits.

The now-leaner brand portfolio is also a much better fit with P&G’s approach to strategic customer partnerships. Of the 65 remaining brands, 18 bring in more than $1 billion a year each, whereas another 17 account for at least $500 million annually. Last year, P&G sold more than $10 billion worth of diaper products under the Pampers brand alone. Eliminating the weaker brands not only relieves P&G of a heavy financial burden, but the stronger portfolio also enables P&G to better meet the needs of its customers. The company expects that there will be far fewer occasions where the best solution for the customer will be to recommend a competing brand.

P&G’s approach to maintaining customer relationships is much, much more than “selling.” “It’s a P&G-specific approach [that lets us] grow business by working as a ‘strategic partner’ with our accounts, focusing on mutually beneficial business-building opportunities,” states the CBD website. “All customers want to improve their businesses; it’s [our] role to help them identify the biggest opportunities.” At P&G, building and maintaining enduring customer relationships involves working with customers to solve their problems for mutual gain. The company knows that if customers succeed, it succeeds.