Customer Perspective

About a century ago, mankind was going through some traumatic times triggered by a cut-throat survival duel that was wildly rampant in the uncivilized world. One great leader, Mahatma Gandhi, realized the need for inspiration on a personal code of conduct to unify humanity. Thus came the creation of three timeless, famed monkeys: Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.

We now live in ‘civilized’ times. Appropriately, the survival duel has moved from personal to corporate arena. Gandhiji did not anticipate the competitive dynamics of the 21st century. So he never planned for any motivational ‘corporate’ version of his monkeys. Thus, it was left to the ingenuity of corporate wizards to improvise on monkey business that best suited their commercial needs. And they did a fabulous job of it. Only one error! Instead of self, they ended up stamping their potential customers with twisted versions of “monkey” metaphors!

Today, the corporate strategies for customer acquisition revolve largely around showcasing self-strengths on what we want to sell to our prospective consumer. In the process, the hearing, speaking, or seeing part from customer’s perspective often takes a back seat. Big mistake! When we ignore prospect’s perspectives, we are effectively rendering them into one of Gandhian monkeys… coaxing them to shut their ears, mouths, or eyes to our advances! And what happens when our frustrated prospect decides to block one or more of his senses towards our approach? Simple. We fail to earn their patronage.

Over the next month, I will be publishing three hilarious incidents from the early years of Cybage. On each occasion, Cybage unwittingly made one of the three Gandhian monkeys of its customer. And, of course, in the funny bargain—we also ended up harvesting three priceless lessons in relationship management. After all, monkey business sometimes can hold more important lessons than imparted by the best of breed corporate trainers .

While I work on assembling and penning these episodes, it’s time for yet another survey relevant to the topic in discussion. Among the following three qualities of human ‘senses’, which one is most critical to achieve effective closures of new business accounts? a) What the prospect is ‘speaking’, we need to decipher its meaning correctly; b) What the prospect is ‘hearing’, it should be relevant to the queries; c) What the prospect is ‘seeing’, needs to be properly packaged and presented by a polished team.