Does your customer care more about impact rather than activities?

All customers care about impact over activities. Activities are all the little things that you do all day that help a customer’s business grow, or your own business grow. (And remember: everyone in the organization has a customer who only cares about impact.) Long gone are the days of providing your to-do list as part of the status update meeting. Is this really an effective way of telling your customer what you are working on? Customers do not have the time to review all that you do. They want to know that what you did helped them achieve their goals. So before you start doing activities, make sure you have asked, “How will it help my customers? How will it benefit the organization?” These questions will help adjust your prioritization and the kinds of conversations that you have with your customers. Of course, there will always be the drudgery of some of your task list activities that keep the business moving forward. Those are just simple expectations of the bare minimum of getting the job done for the customer. If they don’t add to the impact, then they are just things you need to do, not things you need to tell them about. Usually, only when you don’t do it and something goes wrong is when the customer would need to hear about it.

Creating change and impact are frequent discussion questions for ourselves and our customers.  If you set your focus and priorities on impacts over activities, then you will have positioned yourself and your customers for success, as well as actively giving everyone space to affect impact.  This may be a way to prioritize activities for activities’ sake vs. activities that drive impact.

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