2. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world

Hanging out with customers is the richest source of insight, ideas and feedback and you’re not doing it.

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

Credit: John le Carré from whom I stole the title.

Summary: The pandemic and subsequent changes to working habits have accelerated what was an already declining incidence of direct customer engagement. As a leader, obtaining direct, regular feedback from customers is essential for gathering insights about product-market-fit, shifts in the market, identifying development opportunities and obtaining candid feedback about your customer experience.

Directly engaging customers also helps to validate and shape your vision, builds brand trust and taps into a rich source of proof-points for leverage in marketing and acquiring new customers. Demonstrating engagement with customers also enriches your internal culture.

Another foundational principle and something I’d bet good money on is that you’re not getting out and meeting customers anywhere near often enough. While the pandemic massively curtailed this activity and a thick fog has since descended upon what workplace even means anymore, if we’re honest, this was a growing problem even before COVID-19.

And as problems go, it’s both huge and almost imperceptible simultaneously. 

Note: This is likely to be much more acute for fast-growing businesses where operational and market dynamics change frequently.

At its root, and to let you off the hook a bit, I believe much of the blame for this lies at the feet of the way modern productivity software has evolved to place a premium on their collaborative virtues. Earlier generations orbited around improving the lives of individual knowledge workers with peripheral benefits to teams, but these days it’s all about collaborating with others.

Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, Asana, and Trello have undoubtedly been productivity force multipliers, but they’ve also drawn our attention quotient (AQ - I just made that up) inwards and, to the nub my point away from the interface with customers.

F2F > Zoom

But because customers still, if abstractly, populate our rows and columns and light up the pixels on the screens we stare and swipe at all day long, it’s easy to be tricked into thinking we’re still as customer-centric as our About Us pages might testify.

Video meetings are better than nothing but can often feel stilted or subconsciously self-editing in nature, where much of the richness and nuance gets lost in an exchange akin to Long Wave radio vs the Dolby Atmos Digital surround-sound experience that you can only get sitting in front of a real, living & breathing person.

The Fix: Egg & Mayonnaise Sandwiches

At a frequency you personally judge to be a couple of notches beyond the point one would consider sustainable (nothing worth having ever came easy), block out time in your calendar for at least regular video meetings with customers to get you going.

However, you’ll need to move on to Customer Engagement Level 2 pretty quickly, which will involve wearing shoes and outdoor clothes again, buying train tickets and feeling good about eating that last slightly curled-up egg & mayonnaise sandwich that winked at you from the petrol station shelf, while you spend 20 minutes doing laps of an industrial estate looking for Unit 67B.

Depending on your customer profile (B2B, B2C etc.), arranging to meet a customer might take as much as five whole minutes of thought and careful planning, but in a B2B SaaS world, it shouldn’t be very hard at all.

Riding shotgun on physical sales calls, listening in to customer service calls, or even reading and responding to tickets are good ways to blanket yourself in the world of the customer. And the fact you’re demonstrably doing so won’t be lost on your team, either.

Customer Round-Tables

If your business model or customer profile supports it, organising customer round-table meetings and lunches (not dinners; I’ll explain another time) are fantastic ways to harvest feedback, and to be seen by your customers to want that feedback, too.

Plus, the anecdotes and stories you’ll pick up will decorate investor decks and blog posts for months to come.

Note: Lunch round-table tips — Make sure it’s a circular table and don’t just invite 10 customers along for lunch and then just leave them to chat with the people sitting on either side of them because that’s just you paying for lunch. Once everyone’s settled and food orders have been placed, gently dink your spoon on the side of your glass and take charge of chairing a structured discussion while everyone eats. This will enable you to shepherd the discussion towards the areas of the highest value and it also ensures everyone has their say. If your budget extends to it, bonus points for using a private dining setup.

I know that any time I was able to extricate myself from the dense gravitational pull of internal meetings, the daily email boxercise sessions and the endless ‘stuff’ that kept me locked indoors and I managed to venture outside to meet real customers; I always came back completely brimming with new insights and ideas.

I’m certain that as a leader, this not only gave me an edge but it kept it sharp, too.

It’s so important. You’re probably not doing it anywhere near often enough.

And you will not regret it.

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Regards,
GT