customer insight or perfect process for startup success?
Today, I sat down with someone on the product team to review our CRM – supposedly THE "System of Record" for all customer interactions.
For a systems thinker, this is an amazing tool to visualize the customer journey: customer-in, customer-out, potential revenue, and so on throughout the organization. They can see different parts of the funnel, revenue stuck at each stage, and an overall snapshot of marketing, sales, and customer success efforts.
But the real gold is hidden at the individual customer level:
- Why are they stuck at a particular stage? What's going on in their life?
- Why don't they have the urgency to move forward?
- What is their worldview and pain points?
- What are their aspirations and goals?
The best startup teams should operate at both resolutions – brilliant system-level insights backed by subjective understanding of human behavior.
If I HAD to choose one, I would pick understanding individual human behavior.
In reality, sometimes a team that's not technically proficient, whose operations is underdeveloped, run by a bunch of 20-year-olds – and yet the startup as a whole can succeed because they're building on top of customer insights. With the right systems thinking, that trapped full-potential will find expression.