Where’s The Customer?

In the press of developing and executing our GTM strategies, there’s a tendency to be preoccupied with our own organizations, products, goals. It’s easy to understand how that happens, and it happens to all of us. But over time, it’s easy to get distracted. We get focused on our actions. More marketing programs, more outreach, higher levels of activity, more pipeline, and on and on. We review data about the work we do and whether we are doing enough work, seldom questioning whether it is the right work. We focus on the things we do, losing sight of our customers.

In too many conversations, the customer becomes an abstraction. The customer is a market group, an industry segment. To the degree that we even talk about customers in our planning and review meetings, it’s the customer in the abstract, and usually it’s about numbers and data about the things we are doing.

Sometimes, the customer becomes an enterprise. In deal reviews and account reviews, when we talk about the customer it’s “XYZ corporation” and the things we are inflicting on these corporations.

Sometimes we talk about roles/personas as customers. They could be our champions, decisionmakers, influencers, blockers. They could be CROs, CFOs, Ops Managers, and so forth.

But we seldom talk about human beings. “What is Jill thinking about this?” “How do we help Larry get the support he needs?

I see this in reviews. Too often, the customer is an abstraction.

Our of curiosity, I had my friend, ChatGPT, do a simple analysis of about 75 thought leadership pieces on GTM, Sales, Marketing strategies. I asked, “In each article, how often is the concept of a customer brought up. In those references, are the customers discussed in the abstract, for example a market? Are they discussed as specific enterprises (even if the enterprise is not named)? Are they discussed as individuals, not necessarily named, but do they refer to specific people?

The results are not surprising, over 60% had no mention of customers. They focused on internal activities organizations must execute to achieve their revenue goals. In the remaining 40%, about 70% of the discussion was focused on market segments, industries. The rest did refer to enterprises and specific individual roles in those enterprises.

Please don’t take these results as statistically relevant, but they are more indicative of the focus of our thinking and activities. It’s all about us.

And we lose the customer in our thinking.

Yet we aspire to be customer focused.

How do we re-inject the customer into our thinking, our meetings, our planning? Here are a few ideas.

A number of years ago, I worked with a large organization that was intensely customer focused. As part of that, they put images of their customers throughout their offices. In the reception area, there were the customer logos. As you walked through the halls, there were pictures of customers–human beings. Each picture had a name tag with their role and company. Some had very brief stories. And it wasn’t just the top executives. The picture may have been a factory worker using their products, an engineer, an operations person. Their conference rooms were named after key customers. We’d have meetings in the “XYZ Company” meeting room. And in the room were pictures of the customer–perhaps locations, people, and always a brief story about the customer (not about how they were using the products).

This company had a relentless focus on the customer and the pictures reinforced that focus every day.  Since that experience, I’ve seen a number of other companies do similar things, but not with the ferocity of this organization.

Another client, started as many meetings as possible, with a relevant customer story. I’d sit in product design meetings, the engineers would say, “Bill, an ops manager at this company is an example of a target that we are trying to address….” Just starting the meeting in that way changed the mindsets of everyone participating in the meeting. They had a “face” of a customer they were trying to solve a problem for. I have to confess, I didn’t sit in the financial staff meetings, don’t know if they kept up the practice, though my imagination went to, “Sue is the kind of customer we want to pay our bills…” (OK, my imagination has gone amuck.)

These are examples of little things extremely customer focused companies tend to do to help maintain the focus on the customer.

Many companies invite customers into their meetings to talk about the customer strategies/directions/challenges. Others invite customers into product review sessions. Others have customer councils.  Others frequently send their people to visit customers, not to sell or fix something, but to watch them do their work, to interview and learn from them.

In the press of doing our jobs, it’s so easy to get caught up in the things we are doing, forgetting why we are doing those things.

As simple as it may sound, as gimmicky as some of these techniques may appear, they do serve to remind us of our customers.  Not just markets, not enterprises, but people who buy things to solve their problems, to grow, to change.