You Know Your Customer. But Do You Know Their World?

How is it possible that two organizations with essentially the same people, technology and resources can produce dramatically different results?

A client of mine has spent much of his career studying this question, with some amazing results. At one company he consults for, changes in how people worked together generated more than $100 million in recurring annual savings.

At another, manufacturing cycle times were reduced by 67%.

When we started working together, he was positioning his expertise around organizational restructuring and a methodology he’d developed to explain how high-performing organizations operate.

I felt he was approaching the story from the wrong direction.

For starters, who buys organizational restructuring? It sounds like a pretty significant undertaking, probably involving consultants, change management, long sales cycles and months of disruption.

Companies do, however, routinely invest in executive coaching and leadership development. And the executives participating in those programs are trying to accomplish something pretty straightforward: get better results.

So we started thinking about the individual leader rather than the organization and arrived at a different question:

Why can some leaders get dramatically more stuff done than others who have essentially the same people, technology and resources?

Now we had a story that could make a prospective customer curious about what they could accomplish by changing how they lead. My client’s research and methodology provided the answer.

I see this often with founders. They know their products and expertise inside and out. They started their companies because something didn’t exist in the market or they felt they could do it better.

Sometimes they know who they want to sell to and come to me with impressively defined ideal customer profiles.

But knowing who your customer is doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the world they’re living in, the frustrations they’re dealing with or how they think about buying a solution.

As we developed a GTM plan, we didn’t change the expertise or the offering. We changed how we connected it to something customers already wanted.

Founders think about their products. Customers think about their frustrations. Story Engine connects the two.