Table of Contents
What is the purpose of a business? Some people say that it is to make a profit. However, Peter Drucker says, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” All profits are a result of creating and keeping a sufficient number of customers and serving them in a profitable manner.
The most important habit you can develop for business success is the habit of thinking about your customers all the time. Develop an intense customer focus. Put yourself inside their hearts and minds, and see everything you do from the customer’s point of view. Morning, noon, and night, you must place your customers in the center of your thinking in all your business activities.
“To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit.” – Marc Benioff, Salesforce
The aim of all business activities is customer satisfaction. Businesses succeed and grow because they satisfy their customers better than their competitors do. Businesses shrink and decline because they fail to supply their customers with the products and services they want at prices they are willing to pay. To be sure you are doing the right things, one of the most important questions you can ask is, “What does my customer consider value?”
Key points to understand for the purpose of business-
The Power of Clarity
Perhaps the most important word in business and personal success is the word “clarity.” You must be absolutely clear about who you are as a person and what you are trying to accomplish in your business or work. You must develop the habit of thinking carefully about every detail of your business life and then take the time to achieve absolute clarity in several different areas.
Begin with your vision. What is your vision for your ideal business future? If you could wave a magic wand and make your business perfect in every way, what would it look like?
In business when there is no clear, positive, uplifting vision for the business, people eventually lose their enthusiasm and commitment and simply go through the motions of operating the business day by day. They become disengaged from their work.
Just as you need an uplifting and inspiring vision for yourself and your life, you need a vision for your business. Make it a habit to continually define and clarify this picture. Practice “idealization” when you create this vision. Imagine that you have no limitations and can create your business any way you want. The clarity will emerge from it for the purpose of business.
Mission of Business
What is your mission for your business? A mission is always defined in terms of what you want to accomplish for your customers with your business. A mission always contains a measure of some kind that you can use to determine whether your mission has been completed.
For example, for many years, the mission of AT&T was to “bring telephone service within the reach of every American.” It took almost 100 years for AT&T to complete this mission, but the mission never changed until it was achieved.
A company might say, “Our mission is to supply our customers with the best products, backed by the best customer service in our market, and, as a result, achieve sales and profit growth of 15 percent per year.”
With a mission like this, strategic planning, marketing and sales, policies, and procedures all have a central focus that makes it much more likely that this mission will be accomplished. What is your mission for your business and your customers?
Marketing Organization
Every business is essentially a marketing organization. Drucker says the role of the manager is to innovate and market because these are the only two activities that create and keep customers and, ultimately, generate financial results. Surprisingly, most managers spend much of their time on activities that do not involve innovation or marketing.
One study asked business managers, “How important is the marketing function to your company?” Most executives replied, “Very important.” They then analyzed the time usage of these managers and found that only 11 percent of their working week was actually devoted to marketing. Everything else was taken up in paperwork, meetings, administration, and nonmarketing activities.
It is important for you to develop the habit of thinking about marketing and sales results most of the time. Think about your customers. Think about the things you could do, every single day, to make your products and services more attractive to more customers.
One of the best overall missions can be this: “Our mission is to get our customers to buy from us rather than from our competitors, to buy again because they are highly satisfied with their initial purchase, and then to tell and bring their friends to buy from us as well.
The Customer is King
Today in our society, the customer is king—or queen. The customer decides our success or failure. The customer determines our level of growth or decline. Satisfying our customers must be the central focus and the habitual way of thinking of every person in the organization towards the purpose of business. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, once said, “We all have one boss, the customer. And she can fire us any time she wants by simply deciding to shop somewhere else.”
Customers buy just one thing: improvement. The reason a customer buys from you is to improve his or her life in some way. Your job as a businessperson is to convince your prospect that he will be better off buying your product or service than anyone else’s. Marketing, sales, and business strategy is as simple and as straightforward as that.
The customer is always right. If the customer does not buy from you or, even worse, buys from your competitor, it is because—in the customer’s perception—your offerings are not attractive enough to induce the buying decision. For this reason, you must develop the “outside in” habit of dealing with your customers. You must continually look at your products and services from the outside. You must see your products and services through the eyes of your customers so you can make whatever changes are necessary to cause your customer to prefer buying from you.
What Customers Demand
Customers are incredibly selfish. They want the very most for the very least. They want the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price. And they want everything to be better, faster, cheaper, and easier to purchase and use. Whatever satisfied them yesterday is not enough to satisfy them today.
To please the demanding customer of today and tomorrow, you must develop the habit of continually improving what you sell. You must continually raise the bar on yourself. You must continually seek ways to provide your products better, faster, and cheaper if you want to stay ahead of your competition.
The most successful entrepreneurs develop the habit of the intense market and customer orientation. They focus single-mindedly on their customers and think continually, day and night, about different ways they could please and satisfy them even more than before. Whether you start your own business or work for another company, your intense focus on your customers will do more to ensure your success than any other habit you can develop in business. (Excerpt is from ‘Million Dollar Habits’ by Brian Tracy)
