Jason Z. Rose, MHSA, is CEO of Clearsense, an innovative technology company dedicated to transforming healthcare.
In my opinion, it would be difficult to find a business leader who doesn’t at least give lip service to focus on the customer. In reality, their operational frameworks might be bursting with systems and processes that don’t add much value to their value proposition.
The truth is that enabling client success requires more than good intentions. It takes diligent effort and sustained focus to ensure that clients remain at the center of everything you do, and leaders must regularly reevaluate their operations, workforce and messaging to ensure they are all aligned with this aim.
In my experience, companies that prioritize client success tend to exhibit the following habits:
Qualifying Client Fit
It’s never fun to turn away potential clients. But if you can’t help them solve their problems, the relationship simply won’t work over the long term. For example, at my company, we engage in a robust discovery process to ensure we understand a potential client’s needs and whether our offerings are a good fit. If not, we won’t move forward.
Innovating With Client Value Focus
Long ago, when I worked for a different company for a short stint, I became frustrated with the engineering team’s incredible focus on building technology for the sake of technology—so-called innovation. There was very little concern about whether these new tools would be particularly useful for our client’s value proposition. In fact, the client’s value was tremendous, but the technology team had little to do with it.
Before you shoot this down, I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t focus on innovation, of course. In fact, some of the greatest innovations deliver customers something they didn’t even know they wanted. In all cases, though, research and development should be focused on helping clients achieve their goals rather than merely giving the engineering team free rein to build “tech for tech.”
Strategic Thinking
At another previous stop, my company had an important relationship with an incredibly large partner, where we had an even much larger new joint client. We weren’t getting paid on time, and this created an internal short-term accounts receivable (AR) challenge. A colleague decided to go rogue and chew out our partner, jeopardizing our long-term relationship. We eventually got paid, but the relationship was tarnished and ended just a few months later, taking the major customer with them. This colleague was focused on our AR but not legitimate client questions about the value proposition and ultimately lost sight of our larger strategy.
The lesson here is to align your priorities with a long-term strategy to ensure client value stays central to decision making. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing your clients.
Their Customer Is Our Customer
Like many technology companies, mine focuses mostly on business-to-business (B2B) offerings. Those leading similar companies need to focus not only on the needs of their clients but also on the needs of their client’s customers. This is an often overlooked aspect of client success. It can get tricky at times when clients may have their own blind spots—in which case you need to help them re-center their focus on how they can help them not only solve their internal problems but also help their customers.
Client Value Messaging Framework
A sure sign that a company is more focused on itself than on its clients is when messaging is full of gobbly-gook technology features using the most recent buzzwords. Take a look at your website. Is the content about client value or about how great your company is? The answer will tell you quite a bit about how much your company prioritizes client success.
Streamlining Leadership Team To Be Client-Focused
When I became CEO at my current company in early 2024, I knew the first thing I needed to get right was my executive leadership team. I sought to attract leaders who excelled in their respective domains and shared the same client-focused values I wanted in the company culture. I went further and emphasized to my executive leadership that each one of us had an obligation to our clients. That way, when a client issue ever came up, no one in my executive leadership could think, “Oh, that’s Bob’s job.” Clarifying this with your leadership team will ensure everyone cares about resolving client problems.
Taking The Long View
It’s easy for business leaders to get caught up in the next quarter’s earnings report—just as it’s easy for a fitness buff to obsess over the day-to-day fluctuations of the scale or for an investor to overreact to one bad day in the stock market. But these are all short-term metrics. Over the long run, what matters is consistently delivering terrific value to your customers. Do that, and the rest will take care of itself.
If you are interested in reading more about the client value mission, I recommend checking out Amp it Up by Frank Slootman (former CEO of ServiceNow and Snowflake).
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