Читать книгу Selling With Noble Purpose - McLeod Lisa Earle, Lisa Earle McLeod - Страница 24

A lot of organizations prioritize customer centricity. It sounds good in theory. Let's rally our organization around customer needs. Go team! But customer centricity as it's typically implemented is missing a crucial element: impact.

Meeting the customer's needs is certainly better than ignoring your customer's needs. But it can put your team in a reactive position, one that is no different from any of your competitors. If customers are telling you their needs, they're also telling your competition. Most customer‐centric strategies as they're practiced today rely on the unspoken assumption that the customer has the best and most accurate understanding of their needs. In many cases, this isn't true. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

It's not that sellers should be arrogant and ignore customers' needs. But they should have expertise that the customer does not. Exceptional sellers have insights into how customers can achieve their goals: insights customers may not have thought about.

Telling your team to simply focus on the customer could mean anything from helping the customer achieve their goals, to giving the customer a lower price. Without clarity about the impact the organization wants to have on customers, people can wind up feeling like indentured servants. Consider the difference between an organization that says, “Our goal is to meet our customer's every need,” versus an organization whose stated purpose is “We improve the way our customers do business.” Which organization feels more empowered? Trying to please the customer is nice, but it's hardly galvanizing, and it's rarely differentiated. When you have clarity about how you want to improve the customer, you create a more innovative organization.

Selling with Noble Purpose goes beyond pleasing customers; it's about improving customers.

When your people understand that we are here to improve our customer's lives and businesses in ways they may not have even known were possible, your team has a clear North Star. The customer is at the center of the business, but instead of merely reacting to customers, the team is proactive about helping customers get to an even better place.

The stakes become higher, and the role of everyone on the team becomes more important.