Live, Breathe, and Talk Clients—A Note to Business Leaders

As a business leader, you want to spend time communicating with your people. You don’t often get enough time to share your message, and you almost never get enough time to listen to the people who are on the front line serving your clients.

By all means, share your message! But when you are sharing your message, never miss an opportunity to speak passionately about what the business does to create value for your clients! And thank those responsible for producing the results for those clients.

Why the Business Exists

If you want your employees to be inspired and driven to serve your clients, then you have to give meaning to their work. As a business leader you have to speak passionately about what you are doing to create value for your clients. You have to speak passionately about how you are making a difference.

You may be making internal changes to the organization. You may be changing policies that will impact the way your employees perform their jobs. You might even be sharing the most exciting financial news one can possibly imagine.

None of these conversations should go without some dialogue about how what you are doing enables you to better serve your clients.

The business exists to serve your clients. Speaking to how important what you do for your client is should always be “front of mind,” and that means you as the business leader make sure it is kept there.

Thank You for Making That Difference

As a business leader, you do much to serve your clients. But your employees carry the heaviest load; they are the real value creators, day in and day out, serving your clients.

If you want to make clients an afterthought, spend all your time with your employees speaking to their role in complying with the bureaucratic demands of your organization and thank them for doing an excellent job with their paperwork.

Your employees are watching and listening for what is really important. If you live, breathe, and talk bureaucratic compliance, bureaucratic compliance is what you’ll get—at the cost of client focus.

If you want your employee’s good work for your clients to continue, recognize and thank your employees for all that they do to make the difference for your clients. Thank them for going the extra mile to make sure that your clients get the outcomes that your company sold them.

Single people out for recognition when it is deserved, and make a huge public spectacle of it. Tell the story. Make the story a company legend.

If you want your employees, including your salespeople, to live and breathe clients, then you must live, breathe, and talk clients. They will be what you are.

Questions

How much time do your spend talking clients at your company? How much time do you spend focused on things that don’t have much to do with clients?

How good at tying everything you to do to the value it creates for your clients?

If, as a business leader, you don’t talk about what makes you different and worth paying more for, then why should your employees believe and behave differently?

How do you make sure that clients and creating value for your clients dominates your company culture and your agenda?

How do you say thank you to the people who do the heroic acts of keeping your promises?