Too Busy to Build Value?
If so, you’ll have plenty of time soon…
How have you been? Is a “throw away” line.
It prompts a superficial response so we can continue on uninterrupted by reality.
Well, at least it used to be. Now, it might well unleash an emotional litany:
…swamped, buried with projects…barely keeping my head above water, up to my ears in alligators…
Probe a bit and you’ll hear the underlying message: busy, busy, busy, but lacking in results.
What are we busy doing? Reorganizing, planning, recording, assessing and messaging. These things are important, preventing weaknesses from creating crises is a good thing, but most of the time our activities entirely miss the number one charge of any organization – building value. You see, value is not derived by piecing together activities like fabric to a quilt; value is a derivative of aligning the strategies, vision and direction to do ONE THING – acquire and retain customers.
This means more than buying customers through acquisitions and mergers, but really identifying customer needs, developing a marketing plan, selling and most importantly, building new relationships (organic growth). In the past five years, research by The Coffman Organization suggests that employees, managers and leaders are increasingly becoming detached from the customer. Why? The uncomplicated answer is because customers are challenging and sometimes mess up our well thought out plans and strategies.
It is so much easier to restructure, change reporting channels and create communication plans than to figure out how best to acquire new customers and to sustain these relationships. While not bad prima facia, these actions may change behavior but they usually have little to no impact on customer acquisition and sustainability. This should be the litmus test for EVERY initiative, project and hour worked for every single person in the organization.
Let’s be honest, quality standards are far more beneficial to us than to our customers. We use scalability and standards to protect the organization or our own position in the pecking order by ensuring a cookie-cutter approach (“do it like this”), or delivering a message that you adamantly disagree with.
Contemporary organizations keep it simple and NEVER lose sight of what really determines their success. Everyone from HR, IT, Accounting, Operations, Marketing and Sales knows how to separate the hay from the horse manure. There is a widely held expectation that someone knows each and every customer and has a meaningful relationship with them!
When customers voice reasonable needs, great organizations don’t crouch behind the shields of “scope creep” or “out of standard”. They recognize how a $15 part can ultimately result in a $750,000 purchase of heavy machinery. For example, an $18 pizza may not seem like much of a value driver, but when one considers that every man, woman and child consumes 23 pounds (43 slices) of pizza per year, the overall contribution (value) is enormous. Value-building leaders know that creating lifelong customers always trumps the traditional view of satisfying a customer within one transaction.
At The Coffman Organization, we have completed research with hundreds of thousands of employees, managers, leaders and, most importantly, customers. The results are alarming. While no one denies the importance of the customer, they have been reduced to a nameless, faceless entity. Value-driven companies structure themselves around the fact that every touch point results in a stronger or weaker relationship – depending on the human connection. Our data show that customers are not loyal by nature – they actually prefer to switch. Despite this disappointing fact, they do crave meaningful relationships with the people they do business with and trust.
Sales, or more succinctly, a sales driven model will yield unprecedented success when organizations do the following:
- Strive to engage employees around their role in creating great customer outcomes – no matter what role they are in.
- Study your best sales people, NOT “how” they do it, but what THEY NEED to sustain their high performance. Remember that big performance comes with big other stuff too – be ready to manage it.
- Provide meaningful measurements to both sales representatives and their customers – by region, district and territory.
- Use a customer engagement structure as the foundation for excellence. See employee engagement when alongside customer engagement as a leading indicator of the organization’s success.
- Develop your managers around the right things – knowing their employees and developing the kind of meaningful relationships that will accelerate performance and quickly smooth out the inevitable bumps in the road.
- Don’t assume your managers know how to manage people! More often than not, they know how to manage things, which doesn’t promote customer acquisition and retention.
Busy? We want to help you know if what you’re doing is truly building value. Let us show you how our model can help create a culture that does just that.
