Customer obsessed? I don’t believe you.
How to align your company values with the work happening on the ground.
👋 Heya! It’s Alicia. Welcome to the first edition of Finding Customer Focus - a newsletter to help you accelerate growth by putting your customers at the heart of your business.
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Over ten years, I’ve worked across two countries, growing early stage startups and one hypergrowth giant. Along the way, I’ve seen tons of companies touting “Customer Obsession” as a company value. Though well-intended, this usually ends up being more aspirational than a reality they live and breathe.
How it starts to fall apart
The gap between aspirational company values and systematized customer focus grows slowly. For example, let’s say your founder is truly obsessed with the customer experience. Suddenly, you’re a lean, scrappy startup machine, hosting weekly customer interviews to hear brutally honest feedback, and distributing ‘Voice of the Customer’ reports across the business (free template coming in the next newsletter).
But what happens if you close a series A? And then a Series B? What happens when, 2-3 years down the line, you are now beholden to external bodies who want input into where you compete, how you measure success, and whose needs you prioritize?
Or maybe you prefer a bootstrapped approach (the best marketers get creative with their pennies, IMHO). You found early traction from deeply serving the needs of a particular customer. You may think the next step is introducing your product to a dozen new audiences. The more the merrier, right? Why win one vertical when you could win them all?
Generally, I think this is a big mistake for two reasons:
You haven’t built a systematic way to capture the needs of your initial target customer and feed them back into your product roadmap or marketing strategy.
If you haven’t completed #1, how are you going to do it for exponentially more verticals/audiences with varied needs and customer profiles?
You will muddy up the reason why customers loved you in the first place, and shoot yourself in the foot for any long term, sustainable differentiation when the market catches up.
To summarize:
Your Value Proposition will only remain differentiated in a crowded market if you hold on to a long term vision for the real, validated problems that you solve for a particular customer.
Your Positioning & Messaging will only land if you're connecting each distinct customer profile with the most important parts of the Value Proposition that they care about.
How do you make sure that doesn’t happen to you?
If that first bit resonated, I get it. The cracks are beginning to show, and you’re feeling the pain of a murky long term vision and conflicting internal priorities across your business. But the good news is that it can be fixed, and I can give you some tools to get started.
This is the secret: Focus all decision-making on customer needs - across strategy, execution, measurement, and prioritisation.
3 Steps to Finding Customer Focus:
Step 1: Build quantitative and qualitative feedback loops
Become ‘the customer in the room’ through qualitative feedback loops
Find ways to have ongoing, real, live conversations with customers (and prospects) until the process is so baked into your schedule, that you don’t even need to think about it. 11 am on Tuesdays and 2pm on Thursdays are always reserved for customer interviews (an automated CRM workflow and Calendly link will sort all the admin for you).
The reality is that a lot of marketers don’t really know their customers. By creating a routine around listening to your customers’ needs in their own words, I guarantee you’ll find some enlightening wisdom that you hadn’t considered before.
Substantiate your customer expertise with quantified insights
Use anything you can - from good ol’ fashioned market research, to KANO analysis, to tools like Chattermill for customer feedback analytics. Zero budget? Conduct your own surveys and aggregate the voice of your customers or your ‘frontline’ stakeholders (such as commercial, sales, or support teams). This can be used to inform strategy docs, business cases to influence the Product roadmap, and clarifying your messaging across marketing channels.
Tactical example: Create a ‘Voice of the Stakeholder’ Report
Three years ago - early in my hypergrowth journey - I had zero access to budget for insights/research agencies. But I did have growing trust with stakeholders across 10+ global markets who felt passionately about how the product could better serve the needs of our customers. I was also beginning to understand their general feeling of being ignored or undervalued by central strategy leaders.
Similarly, Product Managers often feel pressure to hit commercial goals (contribution profit, incremental growth), but lack the tools to harness customer focus. This introduces a risk that they’ll do anything to hit that goal, versus starting from the root of solving customer problems & jobs to be done. Pile on tons of competing, disparate feedback from stakeholders, and it’s a recipe for siloed, unvalidated product vision. No bueno.
By distributing a simple Google Form survey, it changed everything:
Made feedback actionable: I aggregated hundreds of pieces of qualitative data into something that was easier for my business stakeholders to understand, such as what to build next or how easy/difficult it is to sell the product with the current positioning & messaging (and how that flexes by market). From one survey, we saw that 52% of stakeholders felt that one specific thing could dramatically impact adoption. This led to our PM and Senior Execs reversing their opinion on what to build next, and listening to that data. Strength in numbers, eh?
Helping stakeholders (internal customers) feel invested: The survey created a channel for hundreds of people on the ground-- selling the product, managing objections-- to feel heard, valued, and considered. The amount of trust built through this survey unlocked new insights about nuanced market dynamics, competitive intel, and brutally honest partner feedback. They felt safe enough to share, and I felt empowered to represent their voice centrally.
Help me to help you. This also creates an opportunity for you to teach your peers how to provide more impactful and actionable feedback. What does this mean? Commercial folks - don’t just tell me what your customers/partners want. Tell me what they need, why they need it, who needs it, and how many of them are giving you this feedback. Teach your stakeholders to build a business case that balances the raw needs of the customer with the commercial opportunity associated with actioning their feedback. When you teach your peers how to build an effective business case, you’re upskilling the individual and doing yourself a service in receiving higher quality feedback. I’ve also found this to be a helpful trick in pushing back on “lazy feedback” delivered in a silo without the context of “so what?” If a stakeholder comes ripping into your world demanding your team to build this shiny new feature ASAP, it helps to push back by pressing on the real customer benefit - where did this surface in your feedback loops? What’s driving the urgency around this - our customer needs? Or our internal assumptions?
✨ FREE ‘VOICE OF THE STAKEHOLDER’ SURVEY TEMPLATE ✨
Step 2: Measure business performance against a Value Proposition framework
Build a Value Prop framework that breaks down its functional components into actionable, measurement metrics.
For Marketers especially, build a success measurement framework that puts the customer at the heart of the conversation. This means that the way you approach Monthly Business Reviews, quarterly performance updates, and all hands meetings always starts with understanding how you’re performing against each component of the Value Proposition.
Include Satisfaction levels (NPS, SAT, etc) as well as customer health metrics (churn, LTV, etc) as commercial metrics of equal weight and merit to growth and profitability.
Tactical example: I have a template to share, but let me know if you’re interested and I can dedicate a whole post to it!
Step 3: Foster a culture that rewards consideration for doing the right thing
When it comes to scaling culture, businesses have a knack for defaulting to insular groupthink. The voice of the customer gets lost, forgotten, or worse, consciously stepped over. You need these scalable feedback loops we’ve discussed to protect customer focus in every strategic decision and tactical execution sprint. But process alone isn’t going to cut it; you need to create a culture that rewards doing right by your customer - even if it's at odds with short term goalposts.
A quick note from my soapbox - Companies are not made up of bad people. Companies (and economies) are made up of decent people trying to operate within a predefined framework and set of rules. If the market says “shareholder value at all costs,” then usually, short term commercial performance will follow. But this is rarely economically sustainable nor the best thing for your customers. It takes strong leadership to do the work to cultivate an organization that rewards and celebrates customer focus. This will reap rewards far beyond any immediate quarterly targets, such as bolstered employee and product value propositions.
Tactical example: Audit your own organization and behaviour
From fancy strategy decks to casual offsites, reflect on where and how you create space, routinely, for the customer. How many times do you or your peers launch into the hacky ways you can hit a commercial goal without consideration for validating the needs of the customer, contextualised with your vision for where the market’s going? How many of them lack a comprehensive view of who the strategy is built for? Where does the customer sit in your past decision making? Once you’ve completed this audit, present a shared planning proposal to align senior leadership behind this incredible opportunity to find, and protect, customer focus as you scale.
This is difficult to get right. Start early, and put the customer at the heart of everything you do. You, and the business, will feel the impact— from customer happiness to the bottom line.
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