It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER.
We're moving through these 4 aspects of preparing to PITCH your organization to someone, and we're taking lessons learned from the idea of Shark Tank, when a leader has a few minutes to present their vision or idea. To do this successfully, you need to understand these 4 things:
#4) Know Your Customer
Today we're talking about YOUR CUSTOMER.
We're not really talking about your customer, but we're asking YOU to define who your customer is.
This is how I began to learn this lesson years and years ago:
We had arrived into Ecuador to launch a work (Youth World International). We had worked on our message and had a plan. Our mission statement was simple:
"We exist to identify, teach and equip leaders to impact young people
and families to be disciples of Jesus Christ."
We worked on this for a long time, and finally felt that we had it right.
But we had a problem, and the problem began with me. If you had asked me who our customer was at the time, I would have replied, "Young People". That was who we were targeting, that's why we existed.
Read the mission statement again... It says, "identify, teach, and equip leaders...". Leaders were our real customer. We moved to Ecuador to train and equip an army of leaders who would then reach young people and families.
Let me tell you how this fleshed out in the early years:
Because I wasn't clear on our customer or even our target, we did a lot of things that took us away from that target. We began working with youth groups and leading those youth groups, I began doing training events in local schools, training and teaching young people on topics like drug awareness and how to handle your hormones.
Because this wasn't clear, we were limited in how many young people we could reach because we were a small team, we couldn't keep up, we couldn't really make an impact.
Because of the confusion, we were actually working against our mission. In one church in Quito, the pastor came to me and said that because we were there to work with the young people, he was going to move the 2 adult volunteers that had been working there and have them work with children. We were going backwards!
Then something changed. I was invited to go to Cuba to do a youth training event. I took 2 of our Ecuadorian Leaders with me, and was encouraging them to "watch and learn", but at the airport, my religious visa was revoked, and I wasn't able to do any public teaching. I handed my notes to Santiago and Ivet, and then got to watch them train, teach and challenge young people all week, and they did a great job. I then met with a group of leaders in Cuba, and they showed me the incredible work they were doing across the country by training leaders who then worked with young people. The church was growing and young people were being impacted.
On the flight home, I was challenged to do 2 things:
First, I had to get out of the way and build an organization that focused on "identifying, teaching and equipping leaders" and we had to model that. We built a team of people that all agreed that this was our approach and focus.
Second, while we still cared about young people, we shifted to become an organization that knew our customer... we became a leadership development organization. We trained leaders who would multiply into other leaders who would impact young people and families.
Youth World continues to do that today through some really creative and strategic programs.
Who is your CUSTOMER?
Sometimes I ask this question during a StratOp (Strategic Planning for Organizations). The illustration I use is this:
Think about a box of cold cereal, Corn Flakes. They have these all over the world in some form or another.
Who is the CUSTOMER with each box of Corn Flakes?
Is it the child that eats the cereal?
Is it the mom or dad who buys the cereal for their family?
Is it the store manager who places that cereal in the right place?
Is it the owner of the store who purchases all the right products?
Is it the distributor who purchases the cereal from the manufacturer and distributes it to the store?
It's not so easy when you list it out like this. Who do you market the cereal to? What should the packaging look like? What size font should the health information be in so the parents can read it? What size box? What's the price point?
The maker of cereal can't target everyone?
Who do you think the CUSTOMER is?
Send me a note with your thoughts... HERE.
The challenge is simple today:
Before you launch a new product, a new program or a new organization, understand who YOUR CUSTOMER is.
Entrepreneur magazine shares an article on how to do that HERE, but they challenge people to do 3 things:
#1) RESEARCH: Know your product so you can understand your customer
#2) TEST: Try your product with a test group to see how they respond
#3) NEVER STOP ASKING: Always be asking EVERYONE about your product
"It takes months to find a customer... seconds to lose one." Vince Lombardi
"Defining your target market or niche is the single most important business decision you can make as an entrepreneur." Saskia Gregory
"Don't find customers for your product. Find products for your customers."
Seth Godin
Things I'm Reading, Listening To and Watching This Week:
I'm a creature of habit with my Classic Rock. Jackson Browne has a great collection here with his Essentials Collection.
Here's a great production tool for MAC computers: Ecamm Live
Andy Stanley does a great podcast with Patrick Lencioni talking about the Working Genius Assessment. Listen to PART ONE and PART TWO.
To find out more about Working Genius "If you want to be successful and fulfilled in your work, you must tap into your gifts. That can't happen if you don't know what those gifts are." PATRICK LENCIONI, AUTHOR AND CREATOR OF THE SIX TYPES OF WORKING GENIUS
Peter Greer and Doug Fagerstrom write this book called Succession: Seven practices to navigate mission-critical leadership transitions. Really enjoyed the topic and the practices.