Drucker's Five Questions for Organizational Success
Are There 7 Figures of Untapped Business Within Your Current Customer Relationships?
By Mark Faust

For over a half century, Peter Drucker has boiled down the basics of management to his "5 Questions." He continues to prove how these "basics" are the root of many a problematic situation or opportunity for improvement with any kind of organization. How accurately can you and your team answer...

...Drucker's 5 Questions?

1. What is our mission?

Leaders facilitate its creation and refinement, but the customers (external AND internal) must influence its ongoing evolutio

• How do you elicit input from your team?

2. Who is our customer?

One must always have a prioritized list of their “Best Customers” and “Best Targets for Future Growth.”

• Do you have these lists at the ready, with actionables assigned and calendarized appropriately?
• Have you created an objective way of quantifying and prioritizing prospects and customers in need of attention?
• Are you measuring progress toward customer development?

3. What does the customer value?

4. What are our results?

3 & 4 can only be answered by your customer - “straight from the horses mouth”

• How do you regularly solicit customer input and gather the perceptions that matter most?
  

5. What is our plan?

Most every team will claim to have a plan, but is your plan based on the proper input from the efforts in the above Drucker questions?

“People tend to support that which they help to create.” Have you adequately elicited input from all facets of your team to ensure maximum emotional ownership of your plan?

How do you insure and measure that the plan’s implementation and progress are being adequately monitored?

It is a rarity to find an organization where the right answers to all of the questions above are pervasively and accurately known throughout the team, let alone acted upon accordingly. Despite the process being simple, it can be difficult to instill and continue, and thus it is one of the most common failings of most leaders.

What Can You Do?

How can you as a leader accurately answer and infuse those truths into the thoughts and actions of your team? Here is an overview of the basic steps:

1. Survey your customers
2. Survey your team (the internal customers)
3. Disseminate the answers bilaterally
4. use the findings to:
   • create
   • execute
   • maintain your continuously evolving "Plan"

In 13 years of coaching leaders toward organizational improvement, we've found that some of the most effective ways to execute the surveys and create the plan are the following:

1. Involve Your Team & Others - Enlist input from a diverse set of team members throughout your organization to create the initial questions
   
2. Conduct The Survey - Choose the most objective methods to conduct the surveys throughout the team and customer list
   • Assure and enforce 100% confidence and privacy if requested. Promise that only an amalgamated list of findings will ever be disseminated.
   • Enlist objective independent outside assistance. Whether it is a firm that focuses on conducting qualitative customer surveys, members from your board, or suppliers; points of contact that are objective must be a part of any effective surveying process.
     • Terry Theye, Fortune 500 CEO of TheFutureNow is fond of saying, “We have to have outside eyes constantly looking at us, facilitating us, listening to our customers with us… it is usually from the outside that questions about the dead animal in the front yard are raised… politics need to be eliminated in any discovery and improvement effort.”
3. Refine the Questioning Process - After conducting several customer surveys you’ll find several areas that need either more or less questioning
   
• You’ll also find the “Sweet Spot”, the area Drucker points to with his 3rd & 4th questions. This is the area where you can actually create an ROI model, a quantification of the value you uniquely impart to your customer. Identify and quantify this, qualify and make credible with 3rd party references (your customers), and create a set of questions that elicit a qualification in new prospects and you’ve identified the Holy Grail of consultative selling.
• We call this effort, “Creating the Questioning Vocabulary.” Organizations that believe in and benefit from Partnering vs. Transactional relationships must evolve the selling process to a type of Qualification Process using questions that quantify value to the point that engagement becomes an obvious decision.
4. Communicate Findings & Act on Feedback – Both customers’ and employees’ enthusiasm and improved focus are engendered when they see the findings. Reviewing findings helps to secure customer’s commitment to the relationship when they see that you are willing to address issues and when they see the other “good reasons to stay engaged” that other customers have brought up. Be sure to report on facets of all three areas:

• The Good: What are we doing well? Why do you continue to buy from us vs. the competition?
• The Bad: What could we do better? What do you like about the competition?
• The New: What would you like to see us add or do differently? What are your top challenges as it relates to our area of serving you? If we could solve any of your XYZ problems, what would you want us to tackle first? Why haven’t you bought our X service, Y service or Z services? What would it take for you to engage us in that area?

  People want to know they’ve been heard:

• Action: Be sure to communicate, “as the result of these findings/your input we will be …”

The clear priority of Drucker’s 5 Questions is the focus on the customer. In far too many organizations the perceptions of the customer are assumed. It can’t be said enough:

“Regular, systematic, qualitative customer surveys in the form of open ended conversations that allow the customer to speak on any issue in a free, open, safe and objective forum, is one of the most valuable activities and key to success.”

What is your next step to getting closer to your customer and clarifying the answers to “Drucker’s Five Questions”?

Call us for a complimentary “Discovery Assessment” and learn how to tap into some of the potential with your existing customers and team development.

Links to Peter Drucker’s Best
http://snurl.com/uhm
http://snurl.com/uhs
http://snurl.com/uht