"Because we've always done it that way" no longer applies in today's hyper-connected, customer-empowered environment. There are old, established ways of doing business that most business people working today grew up on -- and the more successful you are, the more you have relied on following these rules to get you where you are.
This makes it hard to accept that continuing to adhere to them will not be good for you or your company. But today, you must break these rules.
RULES TO BREAK - We need to stop doing these:
- Count on products and services to create the value for your company.
- Treat cash as though it's your scarcest resource.
- Make sure you make your numbers this quarter, at all costs.
LAWS TO FOLLOW - We need to start doing these:
1. Treat customers as your scarcest resource. Companies have more communication channels, new product patents, and (even in a recession) access to capital, with only a few notable exceptions. The one thing in limited supply? Customers who are willing to pay for your products. Even if you have a lot of customers, there are still a finite number of them, and that number sets the limit on how much you can grow.
2. Remember that customers, and only customers, pay us money. There has never been a product or sales region or employee that pays us money. Only customers do. That means customers create all the value for a company -- by definition -- and provide the reason we do all the other things we do.
3. Accept that customers create all the value and that customers create value in two ways: They make money for us right now, this quarter, when they pay us more than we spent getting their business during the current period. Most companies are pretty good at measuring and managing that. But many companies don't bother or know how to measure the second kind of value that customers create - the equity that is increased or reduced today for current customer experience - equity that, although created or destroyed today by, for example, the way a complaint call is handled, won't show up as profit or loss until a future period. Companies that use Return on Customer know, for example, how much equity their current revenue is costing them.
The idea behind breaking old rules and establishing new laws is simple: Times have changed, and in an era of customer empowerment, light-speed innovation, employee engagement, focus on corporate culture, and universal trust, you have to change the way you think about the decisions and actions you make and take every day.
Source: by
