Limitation of being driven by customer needs

I can recall numerous times as CEO being told by sales teams “Look, this is what the customer needs”. Translated, this means we need to offer services that meet that need so we can close the opportunity. All too often, the leadership team would go with the customer need to close the deal. The rationale being we will somehow find available resource, and we are smart enough to work out what the deliverable is and make the customer happy. If there was resistance to approving the deal, the argument ‘if we get it right, we can add it to the product portfolio as I know plenty of other customers that will have this need’ came into play.

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The self-limiting factor  

Many businesses operate quite successfully and happily in this manner, but one thing these businesses will not be able to do is scale. There is a natural self-limiting factor in being driven by a customer’s need and not the needs of the market. That self-limiting factor is:

1. Those selling must be involved in delivery as they are designers and implementers.  

2. Those selling need ‘unique human’ industry skills and knowledge to turn a customer need into a solution that drives an outcome to meet that need.

3. The portfolio of products in the business gets too wide meaning:

1. Problems articulating to potential customers where we really excel.

2. Fail to invest wisely as any investment cost is spread too thinly.

3. Unable to identify the right additional sales and delivery resource that is aligned to the products that could drive growth.

However, from my experience whilst all the above were true, my key learning was that the core limiting factor was that it was reactionary.  

My leadership team and I were reacting to events rather than being proactive. I realised to truly scale and drive growth, I needed to have a proactive scaling strategy.

A proactive strategy

A proactive scaling strategy is to understand the needs of the market. Understanding how many customers would have that need. Furthermore, how many customers do I need to satisfy our growth expectations.    

To be clear, this was not about throwing away what we had. It was about being very focussed in identifying the products we felt:

1. Could clearly see solve a problem in the market.

2. Could be differentiated from our competition.

3. Met the needs of our Core Customer.

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Who is the Core Customer

The Core Customer then becomes an interesting definition. The most important being that this is a real person buying who was buying our product, not a company.  

Once you have identified there is a market need for your product then there has to be a buying persona who is actually buying. The buying persona for each product has; a description, needs, and drivers.

We identified two groups and four personas that would become our key focus for growth:

1. Planners

1. Marketing Planner

2. Sales Planner

2. Fixers

1. Marketing Fixers

2. Sales Fixers

Planners are the people who decide what the business is going to do (strategy). Fixers are the implementers of the what the Planners decided (tactical).  

What became clear to us was that most purchase orders for our products was with the Fixers. This meant products targeted at this persona needed to be highly outcome focused. However, the influence on what products should be used to solve a market problem was with the Planners. Products targeted at this persona, whilst showing an outcome, also needed to show how they supported a wider strategy.

Each product had messaging developed that addressed:

1. What problem the product solved for the persona.  

2. How we delivered the product as it related to each persona.

3. The outcomes based on the persona’s key drivers.

From these three elements within the frame of the market need, the self-limiting factors began to quickly erode.

1. Our marketing and sales outreach was focussed on communicating our differentiated offer.

2. Our delivery teams were trained to deliver on that offer.

3. We knew the skills and experience needed in sales and delivery people to scale the offer.

4. We knew the customer needs to be able to deliver a great CX.

A strategy to scale  

A strategy to address scaling requires effort. It requires a business to move from a reactive environment. This is where the business today responds to the customer’s need of the day.

The move is to a proactive environment. This is where the problem the products solve in the market is predefined. The core customer persona is known and proactively targeted.  

An important aspect in a scaling strategy process is the inclusion of the leadership team and, where possible, customer facing managers in defining the core customer persona. Understanding the needs and drivers is not something gathered only from the sales teams. Anybody who is involved in delivering a great customer experience to this persona has valuable insight.  

If you recognise these self-limiting factors in your business, there is a methodology that can be applied. It can identify the right products to scale and deliver core customers a path to achieve scalable growth.

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