On the subject of Customer Focussed Leadership and being the kind of business your customers want to partner and do business with, ultimately it will require the whole organisation at all levels to collaborate and care, in order to have genuine customer focus. This means from the top down, from bottom upwards and intersecting through all the relevant functions, sites, locations and partners. 

Being a customer focussed organisation requires customer leadership at all levels and in all functions. It is not just the role and remit of sales and or customer success. It must infuse into aspects of how business gets done with customers, be that in Strategic Planning, Product and Innovation, Supply chain, Shipping, Revenue and Finance, Brand, Marketing and Communications, Sales and Commercial operations and of course, Customer Success and Retention, to name a few in this non exhaustive list.

Recognising that you must go all in and be truly collaborative is one thing. Actually making that happen and ensuring everyone plays nicely together and interacts for the greater good of the customers and all that exists outside the organisation is a whole other level of effort.  We can not just assume that because individuals all belong to the same organisation they are all rowing the boat in the same direction, and for that matter actually want to be in the boat together at all! 

Over time, I have been fortunate enough to work in organisations and partner with clients who are genuinely all good people who like to play nicely together - most of the time. They understand it’s about the outside world of the customer and are enabled and directed by great leaders, effective processes, approaches and furthermore the right mindsets and behaviours, which lead them to play nicely together and thus fuel the Customer Focus speedboat. At the same time, I’ve also experienced plenty who are the reverse of this. Where individuals and leaders are so blindly focussed on their own success and end-games that collaboration, the art of playing nicely together and thus customer focus is non-existent. 

At Defy Expectations we love to help teams play nicely together and find collaborative practices, processes and mindsets to make this a reality and infuse Customer Focus into the organisational DNA.