The Critical Mental Flip

So many companies fail to grow for two fundamental reasons: first, they are wedded to their products and second, they measure themselves against their competition.

It's natural to fall in love with your product or service. It's defines what you do. It's how you defined yourself. "My company is the leading supplier of widgets to the world." But to the rest of the world, particularly your customers, it's not what you do. They don't buy your product or service, they buy what it does for them. The product of the product or the product of the service.

And you measure yourself, naturally, against your competitors. You've been doing it since grade school. Who had the better grades; who won the football game? So, "we're growing faster, or we're larger or we have higher quality standards or we're more profitable." We all want to be the best at what we do -- better than the competition.

Here's the problem. The most important person in the entire equation hasn't been mentioned yet -- the customer. They are the ones who put up the money that buys your plant, your raw material, pays your labor and all your other costs, and if you run a cost-efficient business, some of their money becomes your profit. But it all starts out as their money. So maybe you should pay attention to what they think, what they believe.

They don't purchase your product or service because "you're the leading or the biggest or the fastest growing or the most profitable." They buy it, they pay their hard-earned money for it because they want what it can do for them. And they've judged that what they buy is the best at doing that.

They don't really care about your product. Or you. Or your company. Or how fast you're growing. Not a whit.

Maybe now they're your loyal, loyal customer. But along comes someone else with something that does what they want to do better than whatever it is that you have been offering. Then that customer becomes your ex-customer. And that someone is all too often not one of your old, familiar competitors.

You're now yesterday's news.

Why didn't you develop that new product that has just captured your customer?

It's simple -- you love your product more than you love your customer.

How do I know? It's because companies that love their customer more than their product or service, continually grow. They set the curve. They value innovation. They continually try to obsolete their own products. Their customer's values are more important.

They have made that mental flip from loving their products to loving their customers.