Why Do We Think Our Customers Know What They Are Doing?

Shout out to my friends Matt Heinz and Brent Adamson. In listening to their weekly webcast, for a few moments, Brent was whining about the issue of “Why do we think our customers know what they are doing?”

It’s an important issue. It’s an important opportunity for sellers to be truly helpful with customers.

Let me be clear, our customers know their business, their work, workflows and how they get things done. Undoubtedly, they are experts in their jobs. We can never come close to them in their knowledge and expertise. Even if we’ve held similar jobs, the specific situations they face are unique.

But, too often, when our customers have a change initiative, or a problem solving initiative, or a buying initiative, we assume the they know what they are doing.

The reality is they never have done those things before—at least with the issue they are currently confronted with. They are doing something that’s totally outside the norm of their jobs.

They may experience with similar issues in the past—but that may have been years ago, and the world has changed.

Part of the role of managers and leaders is to identify problems and changes that need to be made. More than “running the business” everyday, they are accountable for identifying changes, problems. But, still they aren’t doing it every day—if they are they probably aren’t being successful with what they are doing. And each time the problems/issues are different. As a result, they don’t develop any deep expertise is specific types of issues and change initiatives.

Yet, we expect our customers to be experts at doing this. We expect them to know what they are doing.

But in reality, they don’t.

And we see constant data re-affirming this. Whether it’s all the data on buying failures, buyer regret, No Decision Made, and decision confidence (in the event of buying). Or it’s the failure of internal projects (research shows the majority of internal project collaborations do not achieve their goals. Or what we read in the business news about supply chain, product failures, missed earning, and so forth.

Our customers need help. More specifically, they don’t face the problems that we are the best in the world at solving every day!

We are, or should be, the experts at helping customers solve these problems. We work with hundreds and thousands of organizations facing these issues every day. We know the things they need to do to succeed, we know the things that may cause them failure in solving their problems.

We can provide great expertise, experience, and “moral support” in helping them manage the process. We can help them gain confidence they are looking at the right issues, asking themselves the right questions, involving the right people, identifying the risks, making informed choices.

But, the majority of the time, we make the assumption that our customers know what they are doing. We leave the heavy lifting of figuring this out when we focus on the easiest part of their problem–identifying the solution.

How would things change if we changed our assumptions about the customer and their experience in solving these problems? What would happen if we helped them with these issues, if we spent the time learning about what they know and what they don’t know, so we can help them more effectively navigate this process?

So many of our customer engagement strategies are built on this false assumption, that our customers know what they are doing. Isn’t it time to change. Shouldn’t we take the opportunity to create different value with them? And if we make them more successful, then we would, also be more successful.