With the exception of those who make their living as purchasing agents or secret shoppers, most people aren’t professional customers. Rather, they are professional engineers, accountants, human resource managers, customer service reps, chief executive officers (CEOs), or whatever. They spend their time thinking about the things that are most important to them and to the people they care about, are responsible for, and accountable to. They think about family issues, the weather, where to go for lunch, an upcoming sports event, or whichever global calamity dominated the morning news. While they’re at work they also spend at least part of their time thinking about their jobs, their responsibilities, and their objectives, as well as the expectations and obligations placed on them by themselves and others.
While there is no way we can know everything our customers are thinking about, one thing is relatively certain: they’re not spending a whole lot of time sitting around thinking about being our customer. In fact, dealing with vendors and suppliers is considered by many to be somewhat of a pain. Even those who frequently deal with outside vendors typically see it as a means to an end, and unless they work in procurement, it is just one of the many hats they wear each day.
Your customers, or those you hope soon will be, are busy. They are deluged with correspondence of every kind. They’ve got 150 e-mails in their inbox, eleven unplayed voice-mail messages, and a stack of papers on their desk that need to be dealt with ASAP. No wonder when we call it seems as if we are interrupting them. We are!
Imagine for a moment that you are one of the executives on your prospect list. What are some of the things that might occupy your mind? If you were in their position, would you make the time to take a phone call from a salesperson you didn’t know? A general manager who attended one of our workshops recently shared his perspective with the team. He said, ‘Sometimes I do end up talking to salespeople on the phone . . . when I’m expecting a call from someone else and I accidentally pick up the wrong line.’
Our customers (or clients) really aren’t that much different than we are. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that if we spend most of our day thinking about how to keep our boss happy and how to take better care of our customers, our clients probably spend most of their day thinking about how to keep their boss happy and how to take better care of their customers? If we could figure out how to help them do that, and then communicate to them that we could, we might find a lot less resistance.
At some point in my career, I came to the realization that . . .
In the business world, everybody has customers- those who buy, use, or benefit from whatever it is we produce or deliver-and serving our customers is the most important thing we do.
For those of us in professional sales, our customers are the people outside our company who buy what we sell. But for many people in a corporate setting-whether department managers or individual contributors-their customer is their boss or some other ‘internal customer’ who ‘buys’ whatever they produce at a predetermined contract rate (a salary) and then uses that work product to serve and satisfy yet other internal customers within their company.
A design engineer’s customer might be the manufacturing department that uses his blueprint as a guide to making a new product or component. The accounting department’s customers are the various internal or external consumers of the financial data, reports, and analyses that they produce. The CEO’s customers are the shareholders who ‘buy’ a little piece of the company (i.e., shares of stock) based on the promise of favorable returns, which they hope will result in dividends and/or an increase in the value of each share of stock.
Learning to Think Like Your Customer requires each of us to look beyond how we interact with, deliver value to, and serve our own customers. We have to begin to think about how our customers, in turn, interact with, deliver value to, and serve their customers, whoever they may be. Only then can we truly begin to see ourselves the way our customers see us and understand how the products and services we bring to market can impact and add value to our customer’s world.