Achieving balanced customer focus in your social business strategy is like a teeter-totter. One side of the fulcrum represents your prioritization of your internal customers. The other side represents the weight you place on your external customers.
When children play on a teeter-totter, they try to unseat one another. On rare occasions, however, they enjoy testing their skills in seeking balance between two halves of the whole – especially when one player weighs a lot more than the other one.
Finding a balanced customer focus within your social business strategy is no child’s game.
You can’t focus exclusively on one side of your social business teeter-totter without displacing the load on the other side. Otherwise your business development and revenue generation cycles will be constantly fluctuating up-and-down.
There’s no sustainability in that tack at all.
I define social business strategy as “discovering, disseminating/sharing and dissecting / collaborating the significance of information that is mission-critical for moving your business not only forward next month and next year, but towards creating a sustainable economic footprint for the future.”
Like that teeter-totter, social businesses are constantly weighing what they know about their customers, markets, industries, competition, regulations and the economy against what they don’t know.
Your goal is to stabilize cash flow for transition, growth and expansion. Your goal is to be proactive and anticipatory of peaks and valleys in customer acquisition.
Otherwise you have a false sense of business security.
Like two people on a teeter-totter, a balanced customer focus for your social business is achieved by being robust yet nimble and flexible.
Like a teeter-totter, the peaks and valleys of your social business cycle depend on where the teeter-totter fulcrum, that center piece, is placed. On the playground, the teeter-totter fulcrum usually is placed midway along the length of the seat/lever to equalize load.
Have you ever seen several children seated on one side of the teeter-totter to equalize the weight of one of their larger playmates? The children have calculated the risk of one child’s playing alone against their larger playmate versus the benefit of collaborating: partnering and balancing the load while equalizing their chances of success.
Collaborative, cross-functional partnerships are the fulcrum for balanced customer focus in your social business strategy.
- Balanced customer focus for your social business strategy equalizes your internal customer focus and that of the external marketplace.
- Balanced customer focus for your social business engages your internal and external customers in cross-functional dialogue.
- Balanced customer focus for your social business identifies and manages the risks associated with doing business with heavy-weight divas, which can displace your entire business model with their demands.
- Balanced customer focus for your social business optimizes the benefits of partnering with lighter weight customers, offering complementary core capabilities to your own.
- Balanced customer focus for your social business creates opportunities for partnerships leading towards an enduring and sustainable social business strategy for you both.
Seek a balanced customer focus for your social business strategy. This approach is far more cross-functional than your current way of doing business. It’s also more innovative and responsive to today’s globally competitive economy.
Why maintain a business that’s continuously fluctuating between peaks and valleys? The choice is yours.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, catalyzes collaborative business transition, startup growth, and professional development. She works with non-traditional sellers, engineers, small and midmarket manufacturers, and technical startups.
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