The Value Driven Business: The Simple Strategy To Create A Business You Love by Benjamin Teal

Author:Benjamin Teal [Teal, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Benjamin Teal
Published: 2017-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6:

Who is Your Customer?

“I’m paying you, you should do whatever I want!”

~ Not Your Customer

We touched on it briefly in chapter 1 with the story of Herb Koeller and Southwest airlines.

But it isn’t just Herb.

It’s the legendary Henry Ford who said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

And our man Steve Jobs had this to say about customers (on the way to building the world’s largest company at the time):

In a 1998 Business Week article, when talking about customer focus groups, Steve said, “It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

Does that mean you shouldn’t listen to your customers? Absolutely not.

Just a year earlier, at the 1997 World Wide Developer Conference, Steve had this to say about customers:

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology… I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room… As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?’… I think that’s the right path to take.”

Whoa! Doesn’t that contradict all of the others statements?

No. And here’s why. The key phrase is “what incredible benefits can we give to the customer.”

It’s in the benefits. The value you deliver.

Even Henry Ford’s “faster horses” quote has it hidden there. People wanted to get there faster. Sure, they couldn’t envision the automobile. They hadn’t seen it. So, yes, they’d say they want horses. That’s the feature. The delivery mechanism. They are really, ultimately fine without the horse at all, just so long as they get their faster.

You talk to your customers to get some idea of what benefits they want, and then you work backwards from there. If you do it correctly, you can deliver the result before your customer even knows they need it.

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”

~ Steve Jobs

And the best way to do that - to get so close to them that you know what they want before they do - is to attract customers that are just like you. To attract customers that are congruent with your true self and your true passions.

Now, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s talk about customers and customer getting in general.

As we alluded to in Chapter 1, there are two types of customers:

“The” Customer

“Your” Customer

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