Where Is The Customer?

I speak with lots of leaders about their GTM strategies. My social channels are dominated by experts suggesting the GTM strategies. One of the things I’ve started doing is counting how many times they use the word, “Customer.”

It’s surprising how seldom the word is used. When it is, it’s used in the context of the customer being the target of a set of strategies and activities. But most of the time, it seems the word, Customer, is a distraction from what we are trying to do.

We define outreach programs, looking at content, channel, volume, velocity. We set goals for outreach: So many emails, so many social interactions, so many calls/texts, so many conversations, so many meetings. We establish programs and goals for each of these, and the word customer seldom arises.

We look at our pipeline activities, how many first meetings, how many demos, how many proposals, when are we going to close, what discounts are we providing. We look at the volume of these activities require to meet our goals.

When we get a PO, we focus on our retention, expansion goals.

All the conversations are focused on what we do, how are we going to achieve our goals.

With the exception of the customer as the victim target of these activities, the concept of the customer seldom comes up in these conversations.

We have endless conversations around metrics and data analysis. All sorts of conversion ratios, optimization ratios. $s in the numerator, activities in the denominator. The solution to all our performance issues is expressed in an algebraic equation. And the concept of a customer never arises in these equations.

We look at the work we do, how can we be more efficient? How can we leverage technology, tools, and AI to do the work?

We spend endless time defining the work each person in the organization does, and how we measure them. What do we need from marketing, what numbers do we need them to produce? How many BDRs/SDRs do we need, what numbers do they produce? How many AEs/AMs………..? The answers to these are found in the equations.

Our enablement programs support these, what’s our tech stack need to be? What training do we need to give? How much does it cost? How many people have gone through each program? What more do we need to do?

And operations provides us the data, endless charts with dials, red/yellow/green indicators, trend analysis, reports on what the organization is doing. The “customer” is reduced to a number–net new logos, retention/renewal, number of strategic accounts, major accounts, SMB.

Perhaps, the closest conversations come to being concerned about the customer is when/if we do deal or account reviews. But then, the conversation always focuses on the things we are doing to achieve our goals. The only role the customer plays in these conversations is they are the target of our activities.

Every once in a while, I ask an inconvenient question? Who is the customer? Alternatively, “What does the customer care about?” Or, “What help does the customer need?” Or, “Are we doing the things most important to the customer?”

Often, I’m ignored, “Dave, you don’t get it….. We are looking at optimizing our performance and meeting our goals……”

The entire focus of the majority of the GTM strategies I look at, so much of what I see in social media conversations is on, “What are the things we have to do to efficiently achieve our goals?”

And I continue to wonder, “Where is the customer?”

I could go through a bunch of discussions around, “We don’t achieve anything until the customer achieves their goals….” Or I can cite the research showing customers are disengaging. They are looking for, and sometimes finding, the help they need while minimizing their engagement with us.

But we already know that. We already see the plummeting engagement, plummeting results, skyrocketing costs to achieve our goals.

And we continue to run the math equations, looking at the data, focusing less on what we need to do, rather how much more do we need to do.

But the conversation never changes and I still wonder, “Where is the customer?”

How might things change if in more of these conversations we started talking about:

• What’s happening with our customers?
• Where are they struggling the most?
• What’s happening in the industry/market places?
• Where are they seeing the most disruption or change?
• How can we help them understand these issues?
• How can we help them navigate their way to addressing the problems?
• What do we have to change in our GTM to do this?

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  It’s good, enjoy!