3 Ways to Stay Close to Customers, Even at Scale

In the early stages of a company's growth, maintaining deep connections with customers is easy. You know your customers by name and understand the fundamentals of their business. You might even tailor your product with a particular customer in mind.

As businesses grow, however, leaders are increasingly pulled in different directions. Business needs become more complex. There are more stakeholders to engage, and more teams to manage. While it can be practically very challenging, nurturing and growing connections to customers becomes even more important as you scale.

Maintaining strong connections to customers is essential to business success. It is also personally rewarding. Customers are inspiring; they give business owners and entrepreneurs the energy, ideas, and drive to deliver solutions that help them succeed.

The following three leadership habits can help you maintain those connection, especially as your company grows.

1. Schedule Time to Listen

Companies can be so focused on communicating their content out that they can forget to seek content in. Scheduling time to have genuine conversations with customers has been key not just to learning how they feel about our product and service-but also to understanding their motivations, goals, and broader concerns. This sets the foundation for innovation.

Ryan Johnson, vice president of operations at accounting and financial services firm Escalon, recently shared his approach: Align yourself with your customers' lived experience. Feel their pain. Understand their opportunities. Celebrate their successes. It's a strategy that's working-Escalon is a fast-growing leader in its industry.

Maintain a schedule with customers to seek feedback on how you're meeting their needs and to better understand the challenges and opportunities that small and mid-size businesses are facing. Stay connected to feedback on social media. Consider attending events or conferences where customers are to cement that human connection.

Questions to ask customers to help you deepen connections and your own understanding:

• Who are your customers, and why are you passionate about serving them?
• What are the top challenges and opportunities your business faces right now?
• What would make our solution more valuable to you?

2. Align a Customer-Focused Organization

As businesses grow, organizations become more complex. Teams can become too focused on a narrow mission and can miss the big picture around what their customers want. Organizational complexity can also introduce friction points for leaders seeking to connect with customers.

Organizational structures that treat the customer journey holistically are often the most successful at nurturing connections at every level. The goal is to align and streamline your organization in favor of customer connections.

One company recently created a dedicated chief customer officer role, and combined its sales and marketing teams under that leader. This has fostered greater alignment across our go-to-market teams, delivering a more seamless customer experience and empowered teams to create and document feedback opportunities at every customer interaction.

These streamlined feedback loops are important to hear from the customer and help empower teams to identify improvements, innovations, and opportunities to serve customers better. Customer-facing teams have a unique vantage point and can be instrumental to strengthening the ability to deliver.

Questions to ask employees to help orient everyone with a customer mindset:

• How do you connect with our mission and our customer?
• Where do customers experience friction?
• If resources were no barrier, what is one thing we could do better for customers?
• When you use our product, what is your experience?

3. Invest in Partnerships to Serve Your Customers

What really sets a customer-focused company apart is not just what it sells, but how it builds an ecosystem to meet customers' needs holistically. That requires investing in partnerships that deliver for the business, and also meeting customers where they are and creating compounding value for them.

The emergence of embedded partnerships in fintech is a great example. Ten years ago, a small business typically visited a bank first to manage its finances. Today, the front door to small and midsize businesses' financial journey could be in many places. This convergence of software and payments creates opportunities for partnerships where different technologies are embedded into different platforms. The end result is customers can access more powerful and expansive technology tools and capabilities, without adding to their tech stack.

A key to successfully leveraging partnerships in this way is trust. You need trust within the partnership, and customers must trust the company you partner with. Much of this trust stems from an alignment of values. Companies that share my belief that how you deliver is just as important as what you deliver, I've found, make the best partnerships.

Questions to ask prospective partners to ensure you can better serve customers together:

• What are your company values, and how do they influence how you connect with customers?
• How do you deliver a high-quality, responsive, and holistic experience for customers?
• How do you build trust with customers?

Nurturing and strengthening your connections to customers, even as the business scales, is one of the best investments you can make to keep your company moving forward. Familiarity takes time. Genuine connections require effort. It takes work to build and scale that trust. And it breeds success-for everyone involved.

Connect with an Old National Small Business Bankerfor more insights to help your business grow.

This article was written by René Lacerte from Inc. and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplaceby Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to [email protected] .

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