bullseyeNote from Art: Leadership is about driving the right results in the right way.  We often focus on the interpersonal dynamics of leadership and the characteristics and behaviors of effective leaders.  And while those issues are critically important to a firm’s success, so is ensuring that everyone is  focused on the activities that create value.  This inaugural “Leading in the Trenches” post will introduce an on-going series focused on applying effective leadership practices to improving critical organizational practices.

Enjoy!

The word “Customer” takes on a larger than life meaning inside most firms.  It’s bandied about in meetings in slightly reverent tones.  “Oh, the Customer raised this issue.  This must be important.”

It’s used as an argument stopper by those that claim to speak with the Voice of the Customer.  “If that’s what the customers want, we’ll have to give it to them.”

Sometimes, it almost seems like the customer is the enemy.  “They don’t understand our product.  If they would simply attend training, we wouldn’t have to keep simplifying our user interface.”

And at high levels, THE Customer is the reason for new strategies, directions and programs.  Listen to a CEO spout a new direction or shift a paradigm and the name of THE Customer will be invoked somewhere.

Spend some time listening to all of the things done in the name of the customer, and you would be correct if you asked yourself and everyone around you, “who is this customer, anyways?”

I do this with clients (notice the subtle word shift!) and the answers are fascinating.

Them: “Well you know, people who buy are products.”

Me: “Who?”

Them: “You know, consumers.”

Me: “Which ones?”

Them: “The ones with money.”

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OK, that’s a bit of an extreme case, but it happened.  More often than not, I’ll receive a description of a general class of individuals surrounded by demographic and geographic information. When I probe for a detailed understanding of who these people are, why they buy and what key problems they are solving with our offerings the answers begin to resemble the narrative above.

The Issue:

If you don’t know your customers at a sufficient level of detail, including their hopes, dreams and emotions, everything you are doing includes a high degree of guesswork and randomness. Your messaging likely includes a great deal of blah blah about your firm.  Promotional activities are fired from a shotgun, and while they occasionally hit something, there is no viable, sustainable marketing system in place.

Sales efforts are grossly sub-optimized and new product and service development efforts are at best hunches.

Yikes!

It’s time to Grok Your Customers:

The authors of Tuned-In (one of my three most referenced marketing books along with Duct Tape Marketing and Crossing the Chasm) talk in detail about the need to understand individual buyer personas at a deep level. They invoke the term “Grok” popularized by Robert Heinlein in his science fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, and encourage firms to “grok their customers.”

While I don’t encourage the method used in Heinlein’s book…final grokking (if memory serves) occurred once someone died and their remains were made into a nice soup and consumed, if you were able to effectively “grok your customer,” you would come to understand him as well as or better than he understands himself.

The essence of this is of course, you want to understand the customer at an emotional level and use this knowledge to create and deliver messages, products and experiences that address core emotional needs and that fix vexing problems.

John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, talks about defining an ideal customer…one that values what you offer, is profitable for you, and values you and the experience so much that he/she will readily refer you. In order to reach the point where your focus is solely on people that value what you do (the ultimate, well-qualified target audience), you’ve got to put effort into pushing beyond the demographics of a class of customers into learning through observation and interview.

Knowing Your Customers is an Issue for Large and Small Alike

In a recent article (somewhere) on the on-going makeover and turn-around program at Starbucks, it was reported that Howard Schultz bowed to internal team pressure to begin forming a detailed understanding of customer personas…a shift away from the traditional Starbucks focus on creating a culture around their mantra of “rewarding everyday moments.”  Accordingly, it is reported that you can hardly walk through Starbucks headquarters without tripping over cutouts of the core customer personas…all named and labeled with demographic and psychographic attributes. Instead of building a culture for an amorphous audience of coffee drinkers, they can focus on defining their stores, products and services for very specific consumers that value what they have to offer.

The Bottom Line:

Quit talking about customers as an amorphous glob of individuals that you bill.  Start understanding who your profitable customers are and importantly, start learning about the real problems that you solve.

Remember, Peter Revson of Revlon cosmetics didn’t sell make-up, he sold hope.  And the person buying a drill at the home store doesn’t need a drill, he needs a hole.

Quit guessing about your customers and start observing, listening and revisiting on all levels how you are engaging with these people that value what you do for them.