CEO or the Customer: Who is Your Master?

From: Saleslaundry Blog
April 29th, 2009 | Author: Val

Who do we really serve in our businesses?

A current trend in sales organization design is to be customer centric. The customer centric sales model puts the customer at the center of the sales process in an effort to align customers’ needs and buying preferences with the way we design our sales tools and create value.

Add this to our “quality customer service” initiatives, “the customer is always right” statements, and customer service surveys that were once rare, but now seem to have attached themselves via URL to the bottom of every major grocer, retailer and restaurant chain’s receipts in recent memory.

All of this makes sense to me, especially today when it has become clear the power of knowledge once wielded by sales teams has shifted decidedly in favor of the customer researching via the Internet. Coupled with that, customers continue to benefit from splintered product categories offering more product choices, wider selections, and more competitors fighting for dollars.



On this information alone I would have declared the customer “King”, but then I saw this:







It looks to me like to a large extent our Employees are serving our Supervisors who are serving our Middle Managers who are serving our Vice Presidents, who are serving the CEO, who is presumably serving the Board and the shareholders/investors. The remarkable part is, by design, either everyone has their back to the customer or the customer is actually supposed to serve the company!

If customers are truly our focus, or as a corollary, if we should focus on serving our employees so that they will serve our customers, shouldn’t the model look more like this?







With this model, the CEO serves his customers, the Vice Presidents, who are in turn serving the Middle Managers, serving Supervisors who are focused on the health and wellbeing of the Employees so they can give their undivided attention to serving the Customer.

It was wisely said a long time ago that a man cannot serve two masters. So who do you serve?

Are we serving the management team that writes our checks or the people that give the management team the money to make sure our checks don’t bounce?