What makes the biggest difference between companies that don’t succeed and those that do? This is a loaded question with infinite answers. However, my answer is relatively simple.
When you run a company, make sure that the goals of your customers and employees align with your goals for the company.
Sounds simple right?
It may be a concept which is easy to understand but is in direct conflict with the traditional way of doing business. The ‘old’ way of doing business is this: we make something, you buy it. In today’s world this is not a successful model anymore.
The customer dictates the success of the company. If the customer is not getting what he/she wants from your company, they have many other options.
So how do we compete?
It really is as simple as aligning the goals of your company with the wants and needs of your potential customer. In order to meet this objective you first need to find out who your ideal customer is and what he/she is looking for.
Lets say that you are starting a clothing company. You want to make clothes that are extravagant and expensive. Your potential customer wants clothes that are made in an environmentally friendly way. Do you think your clothing company is satisfying the needs, wants, and goals of the customer? The answer is no.
The customer’s goal is to purchase clothes that are manufactured in an environmentally safe way. Your company’s goals are to make extravagant clothing. There is a big disconnect here that will result in the company changing to meet customer’s demands or the company will fail.
This is pretty basic marketing theory.
Now where do your employees come into play?
Lets use the previous example, only this time your company’s goal is to make the most environmentally friendly clothing possible. Therefore your company’s goals are aligned with the customers. Super.
These same customers are highly educated young adults. They are courteous, fun-loving, and are willing to spend the money to buy what they want. However, they are not willing to shop at a store where there is a lot of high pressure sales. These customers want an environment that mimics their expectations of how people should act.
Well right now your employees in your store consist of really well spoken and pushy sales people. They are paid a small base salary combined with commission sales incentives. Again, this is a disconnect.
You have trained your employees to make sales and reward them for doing so in the form of a commission. This means that your employees goals are to make sales, that’s it. I am not in any way saying that commission sales jobs are bad. I have held three such positions. I am simply using this as an example to illustrate my point.
This situation is all too common. Your employee’s goals are to make sales and your customers goals are to purchase environmentally friendly clothing in an environment that reflects their own personalities.
If you were to instead hire employees with the same goals as the customers, things would be different. Hire employees that are chiefly concerned with the environment and pay them not on the number of sales but just on salary, and maybe incentivise them using outside activities.
For example, in this case, what if you paid your employees a commission for going to an environmental meeting, or to get involved in an environmental charity. Don’t you think that your customers, the ones who care about the environment, would recognize this and say, “this is a company that satisfies my needs, I want to buy my clothing exclusively form them.”
Maybe the customers wouldn’t say EXACTLY that, but you are aligning the goals of your customers with your employees and also with your company’s goals. This is the new model of doing business and really one of the only ways your company is going to succeed in a hyper-competitive market!
