Let’s face it.
We all have ideas about how to grow the company where we work. Some of us are more creative than others, but the free flow of possibilities, lofty goals, and strategic visioning is endless inside the boardrooms of corporate America. You sit in meeting after meeting, listening to, contributing, brainstorming, and pitching new ideas to make your company grow faster. You work with intelligent people, many highly educated and affluent with global experience.
You listen to sales presentations from vendors who promise the world on a silver platter if you simply “pilot” their perfect solution.
And then there’s Google.
It wouldn’t be surprising if your company decided one day to have all your managers go do a weekly search for “how to build a high-performing team” in an effort to cut down on training and development costs.
After all, we now live in the Information Age. We have answers galore at our fingertips.
Why are most organizations struggling to get to the next level? Is it due to a shortage of ideas? Or perhaps the wrong ideas?
WHY THE SCRAMBLE?
Companies across the globe are more interconnected than they’ve ever been before, both internally and externally. No longer are we thinking and acting with the team down the hall in mind. We are now making business decisions while our collective fingers are on the pulse evaluating the needs of employees in multiple countries and in turn, taking care of customers with 24/7 support needs.
Creating and delivering value for our customers is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.
Suppose the purpose of a business is still to create a customer, as Peter Drucker quite wisely suggested. In that case, we need a severe wake-up call because virtually every company that’s been around for at least a decade has had to redefine how to create a customer.
Ideas are rampant because nothing seems to work as it used to. Salespeople can’t meet the quota.
Service teams cannot keep a customer happy or respond fast enough. Managers can’t keep employees on the team for more than two years.
Guess who draws the short straw on all of this? The customer.
RESULTS OR REFUND?
Everyone talks about how “demanding” customers are these days. You would be, too if you were paying good money for lousy results. Customers don’t feel as though their needs are truly understood. Search customer survey data from any industry or even from cross-industry studies, and you will be appalled at how terrible companies seem to be doing when it comes to executing the exact items that are supposedly the core of their business.
We’re in an era where everyone knows we’re supposed to be focused on the customer experience, but nobody seems to know what that means. And we can assure you it doesn’t mean we must be friendly to our customers.
This is business.
Customers want to pay for results.
We can teach our employees to be as lovely as a nanny, but it won’t change the fact that our front-line execution is not getting the job done to create the value customers expect from their service providers.
Professional buyers are much more advanced than professional sellers; it’s almost not worth writing about.
But salespeople blame almost all of the company’s “sales” problems.
I have a biased opinion and will openly admit that, but salespeople are certainly not the core of the problem. They are a very obvious target, but selling is merely a method of communicating value on behalf of your company, and the core issue centers around that little word “value.”
VALUE FOR WHOM?
Organizations need to change their relationship with the value their people create. No longer can we settle for the satisfaction we once had with our portfolio of products and services. Everyone claims they sell “solutions” when in reality, many sales organizations simply attempt to bundle together a few offerings that happen to fit conveniently side by side on a proposal, or worse yet, try to push an extra product onto the scope of services because we swear it “adds value.”
Wrong.
Our customers do not care what we sell.
They care about one thing and one thing only. How does our product or service fit into their overall problem-solving journey?
THE GREAT DIVIDE
Who wants to discuss the ever-growing chasm between organizational leaders and the stark reality of their customers’ everyday problems?
Great, let’s dive right in.
Senior executives spend years grooming for the top spots in large enterprises. The best take great pride in leading people and helping their direct reports tap into the human potential inside the organization.
Imparting wisdom upon those less experienced is a familiar ritual for C-Level leaders. There is a tremendous amount of insight that comes with tenure.
Here’s the twist, though.
Today’s business leaders are leading through an economic cycle as we’ve never seen before. Customers know more now than they ever have. The Information Age has been talked about for quite some time, but its implications are vastly underestimated.
There is a massive gap between leaders and the customers their people serve. Not because executives aren’t capable — instead, the demands from customers today are fundamentally different than the needs customers had merely a decade ago, when today’s executives were still working their way up the ranks.
The way work must get done these days to cater to customers is the polar opposite of the siloed structure that has ruled our org charts for many years.
As Forrester Research calls it, the Age of the Customer has changed the management hierarchy for good.
No longer can our organizations survive as stiff decision-making statues that place the executive team on a pedestal. Those in touch with their customers’ current needs have realized that cross-functional collaboration is not just a buzzword anymore — it’s the new normal.
To respond to customers more agilely, executives need empowered teams more than ever.
And to proactively innovate — well, that will require a collective level of learning never seen before by Corporate America.
COLLECTIVE LEARNING
Changing behavior is challenging, no matter who you are. Humans are creatures of habit, and moving away from how we’ve always done things is frightening, especially when jobs are on the line.
But risk takers are too rare, and change management has become such an overused word that it turns people off before the change plan is even unveiled.
What we need is status quo management.
If you’re in business and not changing, you’re dying.
Your customers don’t care if you slouch because they know the options are endless. Now, I am not suggesting that there aren’t some genuinely unique companies, but the emphasis here is on the urgency needed to survive in today’s marketplace, let alone thrive.
Learning to work in new ways is a daily priority; if it isn’t, it should be. Defining the internal capabilities needed to fulfill your future state vision is no longer an exercise reserved for the five year-planning discussion.
