A few days ago in this blog we kicked off a David Letterman style countdown 'Top 10 Revenue Mistakes Tech Companies Keep Making"....
Drum-roll please... #9.... Perspicacity: Is Management In Touch With It's Customers?.... (huh?)
Management guru Peter Drucker once said that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. We've been working with a lot of our clients on this theme, it's a deceptively simple idea. To us, it's basically a question of 'is management in touch with the customers?'
In what we euphemistically call the Litmus Test of Managerial Customer Intimacy, we created a brief checklist below (with examples) to ascertain of management is in touch with customers (or if they're simply faking it)
- Percent of Exec Team time spent with customers and prospects? - Take a lead from Dave DeWalt, the newly appointed CEO at McAfee. When Dave took the helm of this $1B security pure play, he immediately embarked on a '100 Customer, 100 Day' road trip. One key result of that initiative was customer feedback about some McAfee product deficiencies which then led to a strategic acquisition.
- CEO at Chief Sales Officer? - Look no further than CEO Phil 'Dunk' Dunkelberger at PGP. Try getting a hold of this guy the last month of the quarter (you won't unless you're writing PGP a check); you'll find Dunk on the road pounding the pavement with his team.
- Level of 'customer sensory skills' amongst the management team? - Remember the old PC reseller MicroAge? It's now called KST Data and going very strong at $1B/year in revenue. EVP Field Operations Mark 'Eddie' Edson has a reasonably narrow customer base for a company this size and he likes it that way. His team goes very deep with a few few large clients, listens intently, and delivers precisely on customer requests and requirements. The customer sensory skills amongst his management team is unrivaled.
- Win/Loss information in excruciating detail? - John Street and Pete Khanna at MX Logic have this one wired. With 20,000+ customers in the SMB space and a very broad channel, they have a wealth of data they regularly pour through and mine for strategic insights how best to grow revenue.
- Customer 'fingerprints' all over new products? - Check out CEO Loic Le Meur of Seesmic. From the first day this company launched, Loic and his team have very deliberately and intently designed the product from prospective customer input. Let your customers vote on the next feature? You bet. We don't think a startup has ever driven it's product strategy so deeply by customers than the way Seesmic has.
- Breadth and depth of customer evangelism stories? - CEO Terry Gold of Gold Systems is the high water mark here. Each time I visit their Boulder offices I get a tour down several hallways which are literally filled with framed and unsolicited customer feedback stories. It's their 'Customer Wall Of Fame'. Terry has molded an entire company culture around this one very visible manifestation of customer intimacy.
These are great examples of exemplary companies that are exceedingly in tune with their customers and prospects. If you want to be intimate with your customers and prospects, it's simply a checklist if your company is walking the walk. We're proud to work with these companies and to know them.
Stay tuned.
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