How to Be Super-Valuable to Your Customers. My wife taught me this…

My wife taught me this lesson a few years ago: “If you want to help me, ask me what would be most helpful!”

Uh, oh. It was no longer up to me to choose dishes, bedtime or picking up a floor full of toys. But you know what, we’re both happier since!

The same simple truth applies to business.

If you want to be valuable to your customers, don’t tell them what their favorite color should be. Equally important: Don’t decide for your employees how they can best help your customers! As obvious as this sounds, we mess this one up all the time.

My friend and colleague Dr. Guido Quelle, member of the Million Dollar Consultant® Hall of Fame recently discovered something interesting. Research conducted by his Dortmund, Germany based firm, Mandat Managementberatung GmbH, showed that this behavior is way too common.

When you design and institute a process, it obviously makes sense to get input from those who will be affected by it. Yet nearly 60% of survey respondents reported that internal or external customers of new processes provided little (50%) or no (8%) input! They simply weren’t asked. Only 12% of respondents reported that “Desired outcomes of processes are coordinated fully with internal and external customers.”

We all know this. So why do we do it?

We do it to avoid discomfort, conflict or some other feared problem. Or we “don’t have time” and want to move fast.

Almost always we’re trading away a small delay or discomfort today for a bigger problem tomorrow.

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Here’s a useful exercise for your next staff meeting. Ask everyone to write down three areas where, individually or collectively, you are creating problems that can be avoided and / or are laying the foundation for big problems in the future by taking the easy road today.

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