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:
Survey your customers
Survey your team (the internal customers)
Disseminate the answers bilaterally
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:
Involve Your Team & Others
- Enlist input from a diverse set of team members throughout your
organization to create the initial questions
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.”
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.
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.”
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