Leading Entrepreneurship

If your sales team is the only department to know how your customers are using your product and why, then that information will provide you limited benefit as you attempt to grow your company. The valuable information that is contained in the sales department needs to be shared with everyone in your company to be of real benefit.

The how can be tricky. The sales team is compensated to make sales, a short-term goal. The development team, for example, is compensated to build an increasingly viable business, a long-term goal. Taking either out of their natural environment can cause serious friction. But this friction is exactly what has to happen, and it can be even more difficult when these divisions are composed of just one entrepreneur being pulled in multiple directions.

It is worth it, spending all of this time to create standards? Yes! Sharing information creates measurable results, and the ability to measure results. In addition, short-term and long-term sales tend to increase. Short-term because sales gets to learn more about the limitations and restrictions that have not yet been solved (allowing them to speak with more authority to clients), long-term because development gets to hear the ground-level feedback from customers (allowing them to create more customer-oriented products). This creative friction, if harnessed correctly, can create breakthroughs that solve issues concerning all involved. It also allows the entire company to streamline toward caring for and solving core customer issues.

These core customer issues, regardless of what they are, should be considered defects when not met. Why? Because the end result is defective if it did not make the customer as completely whole. The result is, in some way, not what they expected. The result is not the same as others get most of the time.

When your offering is brought to market, it should (at minimum) meet these basic customer expectations. If you can consistently do that, you can then build something fantastic.

How? First and foremost, get buy-in from everyone early. If not everyone agrees there are problems, or even the same problems, attempting to jump to a solution will likely bear no fruit for your company.

Sometimes, this conversation can be tough. In part because of different motivations, as described earlier, but also because of different perspectives, experiences and backgrounds. Herding cats comes to mind. True, but managing the psychological elements has to happen to move forward with success. Establish that the common goal is customer satisfaction, move forward from there. Define where your company has to be to meet everyone’s needs, that’s your job. Let your staff tell you how to get there.

Next, pull together a cross-functional team to investigate the issues and develop solutions with measurable results. Perspective is key to this part working. Different perspectives, that is. If the team only consists of marketing folks, then the solutions may be one-sided, filled with blame, ineffective, or a combination of all of these problems. Try to lean toward the largest amount of diversity you can afford to contribute. Different job functions for sure, but also varying ideas for solutions. One solution is fine, but one solution that had to rise above the rest is even better.

This team should have to struggle to come to a consensus. Only then can you trust you are getting the most thorough and thoughtful solution. If they are able to address all of your concerns in just a few hours, or in one meeting, how much thought could have possibly been given to the solution and measures?

Step three, set meaningful policies. This is harder said than done. Remember when your teacher made you stick to the rules in grade school? Naturally, we look to push the edges of the rules. So, rules have to be hard, but flexible enough to allow reliable professionals to do their jobs, yet still meet their goals.

Think about speed limits. We all follow those rules to the letter, right?

Your policies, to your employees, are the same as speed limits. To be taken as suggestions. This is another reason you want early buy-in and a diverse team. You need a member of every team to help enforce, and they need early buy-in to do this effectively.

Policies, also, need to be closely tied to the goals they are attempting to accomplish. We naturally tend to ignore rules that we don’t understand the intended results of. We learn this lesson as teenagers.

A policy of “no eating on the production floor” is not nearly as effective as “the production floor is required to be kept spotless at all times, including food. Would you like to find crumbs, jewelry or other dust and dirt in your pre-packaged meat?” Yes, question asking is an effective buy-in tool. Yes, relate to employees as consumers, it is what they will understand best. Yes, make the end result of the policy personal, it helps employees know you “get” the customer. Regardless of what anyone in a firm thinks, the customer must come first. Don’t ever lose that perspective.

Fourth step of the process is building feedback into the culture that the policies are establishing. Too many policies are written and enforced to squash conversation. Effective policy is written to stimulate interpretation, thinking and conversation. Every member of your staff, if truly intending to improve the final service to the customer, should feel like an attorney arguing both sides of the law. Allow them a reasonable amount of debate in front of their Supreme Court (you, by the way, just as a pat on the back).

Feedback certainly does not have to be that formal, though, and you also don’t need or want it to be. Feedback can be automated, collected through computers, analyzed from databases, processed into dashboards you can see visually and comprehend immediately. We do this with our accounting data, which is vital to us internally. Why not attempt to do this with data important to our customer?

How many times has your service line gone to voicemail? How many times has an e-mail not been responded to, or responded to negatively. How many products did not meet a client’s expectations?

These questions are difficult to answer when not measuring. Staff interviews can give us a sense of the answer, but not the actual answer. To know if a policy helping to provide a better customer experience is to measure it exactly, and compare against a prior point in time.

To be absolutely clear, policies are fine, but without measures, they will be useless. How else would we know if a policy is working without checking up on the results?

Lastly, be proactive. If the feedback from employees and data tell you something, do something about it. Not only will your actions create awareness to issues, but it should make customers more happy with your service, increasing sales and profits. Employees need to see you take definitive action. The next generation of leaders in your firm need to see what’s important.

Granted, a five step process for developing, supporting, and maintaining service standards may seem too daunting for everyday activity. Think of it this way: Your job is to support your customer, they pay you and your staff to provide these services. At the end of the day, this five step process is your most important job. Build it into your responsibilities and it will become second nature, just like obeying by the speed limit.