Your Customer Does Whatever They Want
Why real customer behavior is more valuable than the assumptions in your business plan.
Click HERE to watch:
Your Customer Does Whatever They Want
Businesspeople love plans. So we create business plans, marketing plans, strategic plans, media plans, sales plans, sales forecasts, sales projections, customer journeys, customer funnels, operations procedures, and carefully constructed spreadsheets that explain exactly what is supposed to happen next.
But words like “projection” should tell us something. A projection estimates what might happen based on a set of assumptions. It certainly doesn’t mean “truth forecast,” even though that’s often how we treat it once we’ve put enough numbers into a spreadsheet, made the columns line up nicely, and printed it in triplicate.
Because regardless of how much we plan, our customer eventually shows up and messes with our assumptions.
No Business Plan Survives Contact With the Customer
The 19th-century Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke famously observed that no plan of operations can extend with certainty beyond the first encounter with the opponent. Today, his observation is usually paraphrased as, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Business plans face a similar problem: no business plan survives contact with the customer. Regardless of how much research you conduct, how carefully you design your product, how thoroughly you map your customer journey, or how many focus groups you convene, sooner or later your customer gets involved.
They use your product differently than you intended, enter your sales funnel in the middle, ignore the feature you spent a fortune developing, become obsessed with something you considered insignificant, skip steps, find shortcuts, invent new uses, compare you to competitors you never considered, and make buying decisions for reasons that never appeared in your research.
But First, a Story.
The Dog Ate the Evidence
We bought our dog a beautiful, expensive collar made of thick leather with sturdy brass fittings. Before we purchased it, someone had selected the leather, designed the hardware, tested the stitching, calculated the tensile strength, and presumably concluded the collar was durable.
But then our poodle conducted her own product test by contorting herself enough to reach the collar, gnawing it off her own neck, and swallowing every little bit except the metal pieces.
The subsequent veterinary bills provided a particularly expensive form of peer review, because apparently what goes in doesn’t always come out.
I’m reasonably certain that eating the collar wasn’t included in the manufacturer’s testing protocol. Instead, someone designed and manufactured a very robust collar based on a reasonable understanding of what dogs do with collars. Then our dog demonstrated at least one more possibility nobody had considered.
The manufacturer designed the collar for the dog they expected. But Charli was the dog that showed up.
What Your Customer Behavior Actually Teaches You
Your business encounters your own version of Charli every day.
Watch What Your Customers Use, Ignore, and Value
You establish your assumptions, make your projections, and put your products and services into the marketplace. Then you pay attention to where customers hesitate, what they ignore, what they ask about, what confuses them, what they tell their friends, what they’re willing to pay extra for, and what they value that you barely noticed.
Every unexpected behavior gives us another piece of information about the people we’re trying to serve. Over time, the gaps between our assumptions and their behavior can show us where our understanding of the customer needs to improve and where there might be new opportunities to add value.
I’ve always been fascinated by what companies think they’re selling and what their customers are actually buying. Companies naturally describe themselves in terms of the products they make, the services they provide, and the features they’ve worked so hard to develop, while customers make their decisions based on what all those things mean in their own lives.
Your Customers Decide What Is Valuable
Creating value requires paying attention to how people actually use what we sell, where they struggle, what they appreciate, what they tell other people about, what they’re willing to pay for, and occasionally what they chew up and swallow.
After all, customers ultimately determine what is valuable because they’re the ones who decide whether to choose us, pay us, come back to us, and recommend us to someone else.
Somewhere, someone probably has a specification sheet proving that our dog’s collar was durable. I’m sure the leather met its specifications, the stitching passed inspection, and the brass hardware performed exactly as designed.
But our veterinarian has the evidence of what happened next.
And that’s probably worth remembering the next time we’re absolutely certain we know how our customers will behave, because, like Charli, reality has a remarkable ability to twist 180 degrees and eat the leather collar.