Focus On The Customer

Whether you are part of a B2B (Business 2 Business) provider or a DTC (Direct To Consumer) business, your company has multiple different stakeholders to keep happy in order for your business to operate successfully and profitability.

Having these successful relationships will help ease the friction that business brings as well as make you more preferable to deal with if any competitors seek to challenge you.

But the most important relationship you will ever have is with the end user or customer. They are the ones whose demand and cash drive the whole ecosystem.

Imagine the iPhone. Yes there are dozens of technology and logistic businesses that contribute to the creation of the product but it relies upon consumers buying and desiring them.

However something uneasy could start happening within your organisation.

Suddenly teams, initiatives, and the company's direction starts to loose focus of what the customer wants and begins to align with what business partners want. You loose touch with those very segments that made your business possible and profitable. You have more meetings with various business partners and not with everyday customers.

This is a recipe for disaster. Being in a shiny office surrounded by hundreds of employees might give you security and the arrogance of invulnerability.

Here are a couple ways to keep your feet on the ground.

1. Have Strong Customer Relationship Management Systems

Whether it be through a digital system or a more traditional approach, these practices are essential to have a constant dipstick for trends, behaviours, shortfalls.

You will have a data-backed relationship with customers to make sure that your organisation's strategy and development is backed by those who would be buying and experiencing them.

It might even showcase an opportunity in a segment that has traditionally been seen as a customer base no one could generate business from.

Having an ear to the ground will not only help your business survive but also to thrive and adapt to changing industry winds.

2. Connecting Customers To Leadership Having all the actionable insights to spur a business forward into success is great but lacking the connection with power and decision making could make all those insights redundant.

Making sure that the data has a constant and immutable relationship with decision makers so as to make sure those with power are kept informed about current and changing consumer behaviour.

For Better Or Worse.

Sometimes management seems to put their heads deep in the ground to ignore the threats to their business.

Customers aren't supposed to keep in line with what businesses wants. Customers change their behaviour due to cultural, psycho-graphic, and functional developments leading to innovation and creative destruction of a whole category.

3. Test Client Hypothesises

In terms of addressing potential changes in client demands, going forward on a project to help address that demand doesn't need to be a zero sum game where it is all or nothing.

Adopting an aspect of the Design Thinking methodology, you can test multiple hypothesises through cost efficient strategies to validate and experiment.

Nobody knows the future and it is a foolish to think that you can predict it.

What you can do is to make sure that you are responsible and manage the risk by trying over several insights to see what "sticks" and if any positive response is met, that would justify further investment of time, money, and people.

I hope that these steps remind you of the importance of customers and how to stay productively in touch with them.