Driving B2B Customer Success Through the ‘Triple Fit Strategy’

The Gist

• Customer-centric focus is essential. B2B success depends on prioritizing customer relationships and long-term value creation.
• Triple Fit Strategy drives partnership. This strategy focuses on aligning planning, execution, and resources for mutual growth.
• Orchestrators play a key role. Sales teams should evolve into orchestrators to foster strategic, collaborative partnerships.

While earning my second master’s in business strategy, I read The Marketing Imagination by Theodore Levitt. Levitt argued that the core purpose of a business is “to create and keep a customer.” This principle compels companies to deeply understand what customers truly want and adapt to deliver lasting value. In this view, the sale isn’t the end but the start of an ongoing, value-driven relationship.

In the complex world of B2B relationships, prioritizing customer focus has become essential. Take Procter & Gamble’s strategic partnership with Walmart, for example. The Triple Fit Strategy, a new book by Christoph Senn and Mehak Gandhi, explores how to build and sustain these long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. Their insights offer a practical framework for deepening connections and creating lasting value for both parties.

The Problems With Growing Customer Business

Challenges of Misaligned Strategies

Growing customer business and delivering a great experience come with many challenges as CMOs know first-hand. Misaligned strategies and unsupported relationships often lead to fragmented efforts, with teams working at cross-purposes instead of in sync. Poor communication only worsens the problem. Too often, teams focus on product-centered solutions instead of adapting to customer needs. Additionally, unscalable processes and incompatible solutions can leave customers feeling underserved and frustrated, while unprepared teams struggle to meet expectations.

Impact of Organizational Silos

Organizational silos often block seamless, collaborative service. I once visited a customer and faced their frustration over issues caused by an unrelated division—highlighting how silos prevent a company from functioning as a unified team. When knowledge is trapped in silos, it stifles growth and weakens transparency and trust. To genuinely grow customer relationships, businesses must dismantle these barriers, share insights and align efforts to serve customers as a cohesive unit.

Triple Fit Strategy Basis

Understanding Customer Expectations

In today’s market, business customers do not simply purchase products or services—they’re buying into a set of expectations. They seek problem-solving, creative thinking, and strategic support to keep their own businesses competitive and innovative. This shift calls for companies to go beyond transactional interactions and focus on orchestration: the art of coordinating resources, people and strategies for mutual growth.

Core Challenges of Triple Fit

Only a small portion of companies, around 15%, meet this high standard of orchestrating business growth. These companies adopt what Senn and Gandhi call the Triple Fit Strategy, moving beyond traditional product-market fit approaches. To implement this strategy, organizations must address three core challenges: understanding growth trajectories, collaboratively executing growth plans and fostering the right conditions for success by equipping their teams to serve as orchestrators and growth champions.

The Triple Fit Strategy requires a deep understanding of both the supplier’s and customer’s growth potential. It involves creating jointly validated growth plans for navigating the complexities of business evolution. And finally, it requires companies invest in upskilling employees, enabling them to lead as orchestrators who drive sustainable, long-term growth. By addressing these areas, businesses can transform their relationships and create partnerships that thrive in today’s dynamic, high-expectation market.

Related Article: 10 Ways to Turn Organizational Silos Into Collaboration Engines

Triple Fit Strategy

Three Essential Levels of Fit

The Triple Fit Strategy centers on putting the customer at the heart of business strategy, building a fit on three essential levels: planning, execution and resources. Here companies align their long-term vision and co-create value. This begins with planning fit, which emphasizes alignment in strategies, relationships and communication.

The next level, execution fit, ensures these elements work effectively in practice, while resources fit requires that both sides are equipped with the right people, structures and knowledge to support the relationship.

From Product-Centric to Customer-Centric

These three layers combine to offer a 360-degree perspective on the customer relationship, helping to transition an organization from a product-centric, internal focus to a customer-centric, outward focus. The goal is to break down the traditional buyer-seller mindset, moving toward a model where two companies act as though they’re one unified entity. This shift demands overcoming common challenges: shedding a product-centric mentality, escaping the trap of purely transactional interactions and re-establishing why the company matters to its customers.

Theodore Levitt’s insight that “all company activities need to target the customer’s success at profit” is at the core of this approach. Customer centricity requires an ongoing conversation with customers, drawing on strategic insights to navigate change and drive transformation. Companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon exemplify this model, working with partners to co-create solutions that deliver mutual value.

Implementing the Triple Fit Strategy involves five actionable steps.

First, assess the current state of the relationship, using specific metrics for each quadrant. Then, identify improvement areas and develop solutions that differentiate between immediate and long-term actions. Meanwhile, persuading key stakeholders often requires creating a shared language around customer priorities and industry trends. Ultimately, the goal is to identify a “game-changer”—a new way of viewing and orchestrating the partnership, grounded in a long-term perspective and sustained, mutual effort.

Navigating Triple Fit Journeys

Strategic Moves for Real Breakthroughs

A Triple Fit journey requires organizations connect the dots in their strategy for real breakthroughs. This means looking beyond traditional product-market fit and focusing on realigning planning, reconfiguring execution and reallocating resources to unlock new sources of value. The Triple Fit Strategy emphasizes a series of strategic moves—improve, protect, boost, optimize and maintain—that shift the focus from static account plans to dynamic growth plans.

Validating Growth Plans

Traditional account plans often miss the mark, bogged down by sales history, opportunity pipelines, and relationship maps without true customer validation or an internal mandate for change. In contrast, a Triple Fit growth plan keeps the focus on customer-centric initiatives and internal transformation through structured planning, sharp execution, and targeted resource use. This process of analysis, strategy, and action results in a validated growth plan, paving the way for leaders to confidently pitch their vision for sustained, customer-driven growth.

Driving Business Success

Orchestrators vs. Traditional Sales Roles

Driving business success in today’s market, claim Senn and Gandhi, requires a shift from traditional sales roles to developing customer general managers—frontline leaders who orchestrate value creation and work deeply within the customer’s business ecosystem. Salespeople in this role act as orchestrators rather than vendors. Where vendors see customers as mere sales generators, orchestrators go beyond a unilateral, transaction-based approach. They build strategic, collaborative relationships, continuously gathering insights about market trends, competitive landscapes, and the customer’s business model. This allows them to leverage the supplier’s capabilities to enhance the customer’s economic success.

The orchestrator’s role involves transforming typical sales tactics into a framework of joint value creation. Rather than focusing solely on immediate sales goals, orchestrators engage in strategic dialogues, collaboratively developing five-year growth plans that are customer-validated and insight-driven. This contrasts sharply with traditional vendor roles that rely on internal forecasts and handoffs to operations without ensuring alignment or execution support. Orchestrators, on the other hand, establish shared governance structures, maintain regular top-management engagement and adapt their go-to-market strategies based on customer segments, creating a partnership that evolves with the customer’s needs.

Leadership’s Role in Orchestration

Effective orchestration, however, requires senior leadership involvement. Leaders who are growth champions like John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco. These leaders engage directly with strategic customers, adopting a customer-first perspective in their day-to-day decisions. By embodying this mindset, they drive the success of orchestrators and ensure the entire organization is aligned around sustainable, customer-centric growth.