Originally published on Forbes in Jul 2024. This article has been republished here.
Leaders: How To Understand Customer Value In An Ever-Changing World
Mustansir Paliwala, Principal at Zomara Group and Director Bus Dev at EQUANS. I help organizations strategize, grow and scale. Let’s connect.
No event or activity in your organizational setup should ever be a constant. The way business is conducted changes with time as do your customers, prospects and their respective organizations. Buying behaviors, needs, outcomes, decision making and all else change with time as well, as they should. The same should be the case with your objectives, go-to-market approach, strategy and vision to accommodate this ever-evolving situation.
Simply put, an “organizational entity” is an organized body of people who have come together with a particular purpose. And in order to be effective in what this body does, people need to play certain roles based on their expertise or experience.
Leadership, for example, is essentially a skill that gets developed on the basis of training, experience and exposure. Sure, there are certain traits individuals possess that make them a more effective leader, but most of it is acquired through sheer hard work. A vast majority of successful leaders we see are the ones who have worked their way up and understand the core fabric of the organization, perhaps better than most there. But sometimes this can bring a rigid decision making model or mindset that relies on past, stale and historical information. I am not alluding that this is a wrong approach but at times could lead to a sort of tunnel vision where you tend to miss or develop the opportunity that might exist on the sidelines.
Agility and nimbleness are key growth drivers, but they need to be embraced and lived in your decision making—primarily when you are building a customer-specific alignment roadmap, but also in the processes side of things. When the comfort of past knowledge fully takes over, it can lead to the creation of a false sense that the future state will pan out exactly how the past situations did.
So how do you, as a leader, ensure you are closest to the existing pulse of the market and fulfilling customer demands exactly as they would like it to be? Expansion is the keyword here.
Leadership groups or governing roles generally are made up of members who are both subject matter experts (finance, operations, legal, etc.) and exceptional people managers for their respective functions. But most leaders have an inward focus. They may not be the ones who engage externally with customers and markets on a daily basis and often rely on their past experiences of when they were more externally engaged. This could be recent or sometime in the past but in both instances it’s still antiquated.
While a C-suite executive should meet their customers from time to time, this is typically not practiced every day. You need to involve resources that live and breathe customers and markets you serve on a daily basis. In other words, your customer service reps, account managers and sales/business development frontline roles should be encouraged to provide their candid and unbiased opinions of what they see externally. These people bring a unique understanding of your customers’ mindsets, which the traditional leadership group may not have visibility of.
We tend to do this by initiating an employee engagement or market survey, but what I am talking about here is to engage someone from that group in the discussion when you are pursuing a customer opportunity.
Insight selling is another area organizations only think about when they are pushed to do so and not proactively. What I mean is developing or packaging your solution in a way that becomes ideal for your customer. Think of this as a strategy to sweeten the deal upfront without your prospective customer asking for it. No way am I implying that you should leave money on the table or alter your accounting, but every scenario presents opportunities for an out-of-the-box approach. You will only be able to find these opportunities if people who know your customers well are included at the same decision-making level as your other leaders.
A massive bonus to this approach is that you are shaping future leaders who not only have operational expertise as SMEs (subject matter experts) in their respective functions but who are also practically experiencing the stress and challenges of critical decision making while being in a protected environment. This is as powerful a C-suite training one can ever wish to get.
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