The customer just wants their guy

The customer doesn’t care who they’re talking to. They want their guy. Whatever you sell, you’re in the my-guy business, as in, “I’ve got a guy. I call him, he gets me results, and I don’t have to deal with anybody else.” (The guy can be a woman, of course. The phrase is about the role.)

And the customer doesn’t care about your org chart. Genuinely doesn’t care. I need a thing, and I need it now. Or I didn’t know I needed this thing, and oh my gosh, look at how good this thing is, and now I want your thing.

Where’s the customer in all of this?

Look at how the industry sells to you. Consultants want to sell you strategy, hand you deliverables and walk away. Sales coaches want to give you a script they wrote for everybody back in the 1990s and walk away. Software companies want to sell you their features and try to prove why those features actually work for you.

But where in that entire equation is the customer? Nowhere.

Everybody’s in sales

Inside the company, everybody’s in sales. Everybody’s in sales in every direction. The ops people have to sell you on why doing this new thing is better, because they probably should have gotten feedback from the people actually using it to start with. Instead they built a pile of theory, and now you will use theory. Good luck.

Meanwhile the people out in the real world are like, bro ham, I’ve been out here getting my butt kicked. None of your theory lines up with real-world data.

And turnover is wicked expensive. I watched a founder breeze right past millions of dollars in cost with one little sentence with commas: “And then this guy quit, and then this guy quit, and this guy quit.” Millions. And every name in that sentence was somebody’s guy.

Every department has its own little kingdom

Then look at how each team gets measured. Marketing worries about the number of leads and the number of calls booked for the sales team. Sales is like, calls completed, that’s my metric. Customer service cares about widgets shipped, or whatever. Everybody’s just fiefdoming their own little kingdom.

And the customer doesn’t care about any of that. Genuinely doesn’t care.

Same with software. When somebody sells you a CRM, you just think, oh, I have to work around what its tools can do. That pigeonholes you into only doing what it can do. And the customer doesn’t care what your CRM does. They don’t care what enterprise contract you signed. That does not matter to them. I need to call my guy, and my guy needs to get me what I want, immediately.

Make every system bend to the pipeline

When you look at the whole pipeline and make every single system bend to the will of the pipeline, now you actually get something that works. (We call that whole path, from the day someone has never heard of you to the day they’re doing everything you hoped a customer would, the Perfect Pipeline.)

Without a view of the whole pipeline, we’re all just segments in our own little areas, only caring about KPIs that stop at a certain point. It’s all in service of the customer’s guy.