Customer focus!

In the last 60 minutes of work…were you involved in activity that was profitable action? Meaning, activity that was helping you or your organization make money.

If the answer is “yes”…please continue.
If the answer is “no”…please stop doing that and immediately transition.

We have a sales meeting once a month. One activity we do is to invite a customer to join us for lunch and then have a business discussion centered around why they do business with us and how could we do more business with other like companies. Wow! Is it ever enlightening to our sales staff, administration and trainers.

Last Friday, we hosted such an event. Here are just a few sound bites of what we heard from our valued customer…

When asked “In the people learning and development area what would you be looking for from a vendor/partner?”

“Well, we are not really interested in the product just convince us that you will help our people connect with our customers”

“We need to become more sophisticated in dealing with external customers”

“In the people development area, it is time not price that holds us back from doing more”

Note: Nothing about how great our programs are, how unbelievable our trainers are, the really exciting seminars we provide, or how competent our sales team is…motivates our customers to buy. Now we still provide the above but the story to the market needs to better align with the customers motivations if we want to do more business.

This 90 minute discussion with our customer was eye opening. It is easy to lose sight of what’s really important in our pressure packed days. The major emphasis should be in keeping customers, finding new customers, staying focused on creating strategy and structure and finally meeting our goals. Sounds simple enough…but what a challenge to execute! I guess that is why we get the big bucks? Smile!

Action steps:
1. Always be asking the three power questions about your market…
a. What are my customers motivated to buy?
b. Do our offerings match?
c. Where does our valued competition fail our customers?
2. Host customers to be your honored guest at a meeting where sales, service, and administration get to hear what is really happening in the market place.