Deferring to the Customer

Don't initiate the conversation with a customer by acting as the expert in their field, it only causes issues.

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Have you seen the movie Moneyball? The film is based the same named book by Michael Lewis about the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager Billy Beane's attempts to assemble a competitive team using statistics.

Well could you imagine a group of consultants that had no industry experience in baseball come in and push their baseball opinions on Billy? Yeah, it happened to a project I was on and it didn’t go well for those consultants. We had a really cool sports project that all the sports fans in our group wanted to be on. Everyone thought they were experts in that type of sport due to playing the fantasy version or being fans. However the customer was a TRUE EXPERT in how they recruited and managed the team. I mean, the customer had articles written about what they were doing in sports magazines. It was really EXTRA for consultants with no industry experience to tell the customer what to do differently. Very quickly, the customer kicked out any consultant who didn’t defer to their expertise. And it very evident visually what had happened, as the technical team was made up of only women by the end of the project. Chatting with these women, all of them stated they could care less about that sport/team/etc.

Look, you have to DEFER to the customer. At least consider the customer team before you come in the door blazing a trail. Yeah, the customer could be doing it wrong. You have to find other ways to influence them without controlling them. Remember that saying the customer is always right? It applies here too, no matter how much it hurts!

Alright, I have more customer situations to talk about in the future. But until then, stay safe everyone!