Are your beliefs about your customers hampering your business?

I was recently on the periphery of a project that went wrong. It would be improper of me to publicly air the gruesome details so I’ll hold back on the nitty gritty but share the lesson.

The team behind the project were all experienced, enthusiastic and energetic players, so the failure of the project came as rather a shock. So much so in fact that at first the team refused to believe that the project had been a failure. But given that virtually no customers had bought the new product, despite a strong marketing campaign and a well-resourced support team, it was hard for even the most rose-tinted team members to argue that the project was a success.

We held a debrief and predictably started debating the small execution stuff. Yes we could have done better at A, B and C, but improving those areas wouldn’t have dramatically changed the outcome.

So we took a step back and looked at how we could have tweaked the product and changed the roll out to make it more appealing. But we still felt that this was incremental and wouldn’t have sufficiently changed the outcome.

And that’s when we went back to first principles and asked whether there was really a demand for the product in the first place.

We started looking at this by listing our beliefs about our customers and their needs. And that’s when it hit us:

• Each person on the team had different beliefs about the customer group and their needs.
• The most influential team members had, in the past, been in the target customer group but they had ‘matured’ out of it so their beliefs about the customer group were no longer current.
• The team hadn’t articulated a single set of beliefs about the customers and their needs so the project was based on a conflicting jumble of beliefs about customers.
• The team hadn’t tested wether their beliefs about the customers were true because they hadn’t got a single list of beliefs to test.

Further research and delving into the issue revealed the most interesting point of all.

The team members who had started the business had done so when they were members of the target customer group. This isn’t unusual; many people start businesses because they are frustrated about something that directly impacts them, and so they seek to solve it.

However, the founders had matured out of the target group and, without realising it, had lost touch. We later realised that the founders’ beliefs about the customer group were the ones that were most off kilter.

This story was a very good reminder to me of a basic lesson, which is to be continually asking: “What are our beliefs about our customers and their needs?”

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).