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As a leader of your organization, what do you focus on? I bet if you’re being honest, it’s generally internal. You focus on your employees. You focus on your budget and finances. You focus on your vision and where to invest R&D dollars. You focus on which new technologies to adopt. A thousand places demand your focus, and they are all important decisions, but where are the customers in these decisions?
Too often, we pigeonhole thinking about customers to our conversations on customer support. We think customer satisfaction insights come from dissecting our latest NPS scores. Yes, customers should be central to those discussions, but they should also be central in every single decision you make about running your business. Are they?
Running a business is like driving a car. There are wheels to turn, pedals to push, and knobs to twist. Some of those are used to drive the car, and some impact the driver’s comfort. But never forget, the primary purpose is to drive the car. And to do that, most of your focus must be out the window.
Imagine if you drove a car like most people ran their business. You’d have your head down, looking at the dashboard, thinking about how to optimize and which buttons to push. Of course, you would eventually crash because you weren’t looking out the window.
The same is true in business. Your business will crash if you don’t focus on your customers. What does a crash look like in business? It’s when your competitors service YOUR customers better than you did. Here is a thought:
Every decision your company makes impacts your customers.
Some decisions have less impact than others, of course. But we must never forget that all our decisions impact our customers in some way.
What if every decision required answering, “How does this impact our customers?” You would quickly realize that very few people inside your company understand your market. If this is true, how can you be customer-centric?
My recommendation is to focus more outside your company. Focus on your buyers and customers. Focus on how they make purchase decisions about products like yours. Learn what they value.
This doesn’t mean that every decision we make will be only with the customer in mind. But it will mean that we will stop being surprised by how our decisions affect our customers, the value they derive from our products, and ultimately, what they’re willing to pay.
How much of your time do you spend focused inward instead of on the customers? How about the people around you? Everyone should spend more time looking out the windshield.
Share your comments on the LinkedIn post.
Now, go make an impact!
Tags: leader, leadership
