Why should I care about the customer — my job is to sell products!
Nobody buys a product just because someone else is selling it. There is always a situation, a need and a measure of value motivating the purchase.
Ask yourself: what was the last thing you bought?
It could be a coffee this morning, groceries yesterday, an axe, soap, drone etc. anything.
Then ask: why did you buy it?
The answer is the underlying motivation for the purchase, and there is always a motivation.
Finally ask: how are you measuring the value?
e.g. if I bought a pack of gum because I want to get rid of my bad breath, then if I feel the bad breath is gone, its a good purchase.
Now go and ask other people the same questions and listen to their responses.
What you will find is that there is always a motivation and a measure of value behind any purchase. Be that a consumer purchase as the examples above or a B2B-purchase (although in the latter the motivation might be different than the use of the product itself).
there is always a motivation and a measure of value behind any purchase
And you will also find that the motivation is never to become a ‘customer’ or the acquisition itself. (While that is unfortunately what we too often focus on .. hello “customer journeys”).
[never is probably a too strong word, there are always anomalies. E.g. someone motivated by the joy of walking around shop isles looking at and choosing products.]
The challenge is that when we make models to describe the customer what we are really doing is describing ourselves. e.g. while a customer is motivated by what they can achieve from using a product what the customer journey is focusing on his how we’d like to organize our internal operations.
This is only natural: we distance ourselves from what we can’t control (the environment we are in including the customer etc.) and we focus on what we can control (internal operations).
Also try this:
If you ask someone at your company what success looks like the chance of them describing their own output is much higher than they describing the customer and the business outcome.
Not because they want to. My own research indicates that people truly see the customer, want to bring value to them and measure that value… unfortunately we are not giving them the tools to do this.
people truly see the customer, want to bring value to them and measure that value… unfortunately we are not giving them the tools to do this
From a customer’s own perspective an e.g. customer journey only makes sense if the one thing they care most about is chronology. If they wake up every morning and think: which stage am I on today on my path to purchasing product x, and where do I want to go next…
But if you think that is not what goes through the minds of your customers when they are in a situation where your product can offer value, then I invite you to figure out what it is. And then find out what model would best describe what the customer cares about. With their motivation and/or influence is at the heart of the model. And then map out everything that leads to more or less of that motivation.
If you do that, you will be able to picture a true customer, or even an ecosystem map of the environment that you are in, seeing where you can have influence in order to deliver value and drive impact.
Only if the model we think of to describe our job changes will people stop thinking that their job is to sell products and rather to serve customers or even the bigger system (depending on industry ofcourse).
The wonderful thing about this is that I’ve never encountered a team that were not able to answer these questions if you ask them … but you have to start asking them the right questions.
