Tuesday, 8.48pm
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The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people. – Tom Peters
Here are three things to remember:
- Marketing is the art of creating a conversation.
- Sales is the art of creating a customer.
- Business is the art of creating value.
I’m at the section of John Seddon’s book ‘Freedom from command and control’ where he talks about customers.
Seddon is not a fan of customer relationship management (CRM) systems – after all, he asks, which one of your customers really wants to be “managed”?
Not one, is the answer. No one wants you to track and collect data and treat them like an object, one to be described and cataloged and retrieved and polished and put away.
The problem is that the only messages you get is that the way to do anything is with software.
That’s a message sent to you by people that make tools – so you should really be wary.
The reality is that your customers are people and if you want to create value for them you need to understand what they need and give it to them.
It’s that simple.
But not easy.
I have, I think it’s fair to say, created systems that have enabled the delivery of billions of pounds worth of transactions.
What kind of complicated system was this, you might ask?
It was a spreadsheet.
Not because I couldn’t build a complicated tool – I can and did – but a complicated tool did not help when the key thing was delivering what “work” was from the point of view of the customer.
Complexity does not create trust, if anything it first makes people wary and then if there is anything at all wrong in what you’re showing, it burns it off entirely.
Trust emerges when a customer believes that you understand their situation and know what they need.
It starts with listening.
Now, the fancy term for this, is qualitative research.
You’re going to listen to your customer, ask questions, take notes, look around their operations, read about them – and gather qualitative data – going beyond the numbers to build a rich appreciation of their situation.
This is not the kind of thing anyone types into a CRM, into a little box that’s meant for a summary of a discussion.
It’s a conversation that’s had between someone who needs work doing and someone who knows how the work is done.
Anybody else in the middle of that conversation, anything else in the middle of that conversation, is in the way.
And boy do people like getting in the way.
As organizations grow, all kinds of people get in between customers and the individuals that do value work – the work that the customer needs doing.
These people slow things down, try to manage from a distance, standardize things that should be left to the discretion of workers and generally complicate the heck out the simple task of working on what needs to be done and creating value.
It’s one of the hazards of growth.
Most companies struggle, not because of the competition, but because they just stop innovating, stop moving forward – they are stopped by the inertia that builds as they get bigger.
But there’s always a way out of the mess – a very simple way to cut through the tangled mess of an organizational wilderness.
Contact your customer or prospect. Get them on a video call. Talk to them. Listen.
And you will learn all you need to learn to build your business.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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