People have a natural tendency this time of year to think about what they accomplished over the last 12 months, and what they want to do with the next 12.
As business leaders, however, I would argue that we owe it to our customers, our employees, and even ourselves to use what we learned in 2024 to improve things in 2025.
I’d like to offer a few tips to guide that reflection time.
Tip 1: Prioritize the Clients’ Experience Over Your Corporate Experience.
The best way to conduct your end of year planning is to think about your customers’ experience, and not your personal business experience. I know the missed deadlines and sales targets are frustrating, and we will tackle those, but let’s use the customers’ experience to put them in the proper perspective.
Here’s a few questions to get you started:
Did you serve your clients well?
Did you deliver on your promises?
Did your team truly do their best work?
Amidst the frustration of the past year, sometimes these questions never get asked. We teach our clients to use customer-focused questions to conduct the post mortem of their year.
If you didn’t serve your clients well, what happened? Did you not have the right people? Did you not train them properly? Did you not give them the right tools? Were you unclear in your communication and direction to them? Did you over promise something? Did you take on a job outside of your wheelhouse? Did you deviate from the type of work that you do best?
Wherever you answered yes provides a starting point to dig deeper—but not yet!
Tip 2: Understand Why Your Clients Buy From You.
After 30 years of working and consulting in the c-suite, one of my favorite questions to ask business leaders is “why do your clients buy from you”?
The answer always reveals how well a business leader understands their ideal customer.
Businesses that create and use an ideal client profile fare much better than those who believe they’re exempt because they serve a wide variety of customers.
An ideal client can be many different things. They could be defined around a geographic area, a size preference, a specific industry, or a problem you solve well. Whatever it is, you need to have a clear ideal client profile so that you can then sell against it, create your marketing materials for, that you develop training for, and your process around.
Tip 3: Let Your Ideal Client Guide Your Procedure Audit.
Now, simply combine everything together. If you’ve figured out what you can do to improve the customer experience, and you’re focused on improving that experience for your ideal client, you’ll have a clear guide to inform the kind of work you should be doing.
Let’s use an example to tie it all together. Let’s say you weren’t happy with how your team met deadlines. After exploring why, you uncovered that a large portion of those clients were outside your immediate geographic area. Now you can figure out whether you want to improve long distance distribution, or adjust your marketing strategy to attract clients that are a better fit for your existing distribution system.
Whatever the case may be, examining the customer experience and creating an ideal client profile helps identify the processes or procedures you need to improve so your team can do ideal work for the ideal client.
Performance CXO Can Maximize Your FY 2025.
Whatever your challenge is, we’re here to help. Performance CXO can help you create an ideal client profile, analyze your processes and procedures, map your marketing and sales tactics back to your ideal client profile, or strengthen your training and development program to better serve those ideal clients.
If you’d like to learn more about that, or any of our other services, just reach out to us here!