Successful Business Leaders Share One Purpose
Every successful business leader has one single-minded purpose, create customers.
Businesses aren’t born until they create customers;
they die when they stop.
I love writing about the qualities and behaviors of effective leaders. But, all the clarity, alignment, collaboration, and vision in the world won’t mean a thing if you don’t create customers.
Peter Drucker said,
“The purpose of business is to create a customer.”
Danger:
Internally focused leaders are worse than useless, they’re destructive, when they lose touch with creating customers. Process improvement is futile, for example, if you aren’t creating customers.
Leaders who don’t spend personal time with potential customers inevitably lose touch with the purpose of business.
Leaders don’t drive business, prospective customers do.
Connect:
When was the last time you spent time with potential customers? I’m not talking about customer surveys.
When was the last time you –
- Had coffee with a potential customer, not to sell but to learn.
- Invited potential customers to meetings.
- Listened to current customers without making excuses for their complaints or concerns.
- Sat with new customers to ask why they chose you.
- Personally invited new customers to share the experience they had with your business.
When was the last time you – not the customer service department – looked into the eyes of a potential customer and asked, “How can I serve you?”
Marketing:
Everyone who hates marketing hates business.
If you’re too good to market, you’re too good for business.
Peter Drucker said,
“The business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
Myopic, ingrown business leaders sit in meetings talking to each other. They’ve lost touch with the reason for their existence, creating customers.
What causes business leaders to lose touch with customers?
How can business leaders stay focused on the fundamental goal of creating customers?
A great fruitful short and sweet blog ,that was a great one sir
Thank you sir.
I think the only way to stay focused on creating customers is to create good leaders to do all of the others things. John Maxwell’s “Law of Explosive Growth” is just that. If you lead leaders you will have trust in your team to carry on while you have the time for building relationships with potential customers.
Thanks for the reminder.
Thanks Anthony. I wonder if the leaders we create should also think of themselves as customer creators? Best
Leaders lose focus on customers when they get to mucked down in metrics. Look up and listen to what customers are really saying.
Thanks Karin… too easy to do. Plus, I think constantly solving problems can become a distraction.
Hey Dan, two days in a row!! Great stuff today!
Out brains if not got a filter that keeps us from seeing everything that is around us helps. Helps us stay somewhat focused.
My point is there are millions if not billions of potential distractions there to pull my attention off point.
What I try to do is make the goal big. My way of focusing is I start with helping Gods other kids.
Some of helping some of them will be with the services the company I work for has for them.
If I stay in the present moment all day long the way God has my day planned will unfold right in front of me. God narrows the plan by who shows up in front of me.
When a person I can serve gets close enough I present my commercial of how I can serve them. If something happens it was supposed to. If it wasn’t nothing I could have done about it. Next.
Working off the inspiration of my higher powers will for me, serving others like I would hope they would serve me, leaving the results to God.
I know not what they teach at Haaaaaavvvvvvvaaaaahhhddd!
Just with 70% of people leaving their work everyday feeling no one there cares about them, a country 17 trillion in debt, an education system resulting in our kids 25th out of 34 in math and science….
Maybe just maybe the paradigms are wrong.
Great stuff today
Thanks Dan
SP back to the present! Sometimes HP and I chat and I ask if he/she is cool with these results of how we are getting along. The inspiration I get back is what do you think? Is this the best y’all can do with all I give ya to work with most important of which is each other?
Ok thumb downers do your thing!!!! Hehe
Thanks Scott. It’s amazing how easy it is to become distracted from what’s important.
Love this, Dan! As we ascend to a “30,000 feet” view of the business, it’s tempting to make ants out of our key stakeholders and customers. Notice I separated those two? The customers don’t actually HAVE a stake in your business– if your plane goes down, they’ll just switch airlines.
How important to stay plugged in and accessible to your team and customers! Thanks for the reminder.
“Make ants out of our key stakeholders and customers,” is powerfully challenging. Thanks.
I wonder if it’s possible to transform some customers into stakeholders?
best
Staying customer focused is so important but easily forgotten as other things pile up for a company. How do they do it? I think the answer is, stay close the customer. So many companies stand at a distance and throw ads and promotions at them instead of sitting down and asking, as you said, “How can I serve you?”.
Thanks Douglas. It’s so easy to throw a generic ad at a customer and think we have connected… Doh!
“The things we need to know to be successful are locked inside customers and prospects..” (so we need to her them, not just tell them)
one of my working “mantras”
That is awesome!
glad it encourages.. thanks!
KaPow!
🙂
I absolutely agree with this
Thanks Rajiv
“Every successful business leader has one single-minded purpose, create customers.” What a terrific, laser-focused opening line!
I started my career in accounting/auditing/finance; but somewhere along the way (through take-overs and RIFs), I spent a number of years as a commission only marketing and sales guy.
In the intervening years, I’ve also been with companies that talk about marketing almost in whispers, as if they’re ashamed they “have” to do it.
Come on! This ain’t the Field of Dreams, kids . . . just because you build it does NOT mean they will come.
Here here!!!!!!
I Concur!!!
We are all selling something, a product, service, story, all of us.
We do this with stories cause people like stories. They BUY stories. Our brains are wired that way.
I love fishing and me and grandpa went fishing and talked more about life than fish! This one time last week I used this lure and the fish I could was do big I could hardly reel it in!!!! I love my grandpa and fishing.
You fish? Want one of these lures so you can have an experience like me?
Facts tell, stories sell.
In human transactions a story is bought everytime, yours or theirs.
So I see selling as telling stories to friends.
I am a collector of friends and money, you ought to see my collection!!!!!
That is a quote from a friend who made 75 million bucks over the last 30 years making friends and telling stories.
So I can follow him who gets results or theorists who write about them.
Good stuff Scott B from Scott P
One other thing, the laser focused opening statement is cool and all just incomplete.
Add keeps customers to it and feel that.
Any idiot can set himself on fire and attract a crowd.
Who can get and KEEPS customers seems more like a winner of a statement to me, just saying.
So Scott you buying my story bout dat? Hehe
I agree, my man. Attracting ’em has to happen first . . . then comes the keeping part. If you can’t attract ’em, you’ve got nothing to worry about keeping.
Dear Dan,
Quite an interesting post! It’s very much true that Creating Customers should be an ultimate objective of any long-term business. Earning profits become derivative then and all other objectives are linked with satisfying customers and meeting their needs constantly,which calls for innovation and investment in R & D.
However, one should not forget the Internal Customers i.e. your own employees or people. They need to be nurtured well, looked with adequate respect and kept satisfied with monetary and non-monetary benefits. They are the backbone of a company and can help you achieve the business’s ultimate objective.
Thank you Dr. Asher.
So true, taking care of employees is the path to keeping the customers that successful business leaders create. 🙂
Cheers
Some so-called leaders fail because they keep themselves busy doing the safe URGENT busy work due to their fear of failure in doing the uncomfortable IMPORTANT work of building customer relations. It is just easier staying in the office.
Thank you Joe… Well said! It is incredibly easy to substitute an urgency for a priority!
Customers drive business and if you don’t take care of them, someone else will. The same applies to potential customers. Learning to listen and observe is just as valuable as talking the talk. Great post!
Dan I so agree with you on all accounts. Especially in “Some so-called leaders fail because they keep themselves busy doing the safe URGENT busy work due to their fear of failure in doing the uncomfortable IMPORTANT work of building customer relations. It is just easier staying in the office.”
You sparked a memory… remember the book and then Disney movie, The Prince and the Pauper. They switch roles because the Prince wants to see what it is really like outside of the palace walls. When you have that in-touch behavior, your eyes open, and the light goes on. If you know what your clients “want” then what you do in response will make or break you.
Thanks for your post!
Sue Bock
http://couragetoadventure.com/blog
Too many leaders treat their business like an adventure to outer space. Yes it’s new, it’s exciting, it’s an amazing feat but … once the launch is done and the fuel is spent, they assume the business will run effortlessly in a self sustaining orbit.
This is a great post Dan and a good reminder that we need to do a few things really, really, really well. One of them is realizing that in every second more new customers are born than those who die. Someone, somewhere, is trying something for the first time ever in their lives that may have been existence for many years.
If you don’t know your customer, then you really don’t know your business.