Every entrepreneur dreams of growing their business to serve all the people they envision need their offering. At some point, most entrepreneurs get stuck in the execution and operation of what they’ve built, while their dreams recede with regret in their rear-view mirror. Simbiotrek (sim-bÄ“-ˈä-ˈtrek) was founded to get entrepreneurs unstuck—or better yet, so they avoid getting stuck all together.
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If you run a small- or medium-sized business, you likely have a very intimate knowledge about your customers’ needs and goals that many of your larger competitors do not. This is why we, at Simbiotrek (sim-bÄ“-ˈä-ˈtrek), believe there is huge opportunity for smaller firms with established offerings to grow and have oversized impact by focusing on customer value.
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The NABC business model framework was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and is credited as a major component of its successful turnaround through the development of impactful innovations.
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I recently posted on LinkedIn some thoughts on Peter Drucker’s famous statement, “There is only one valid purpose of a corporation: to create a customer.” My beliefs in customer sovereignty (meaning that customers have the freedom to take their business wherever they want) and in customers experiencing value from your offerings as the ultimate indicator of future success, led me leave an excellent job, company, and colleagues to start my own business. But it takes constant effort to keep focused on adhering to those beliefs, just as it takes constant effort to keep a company focused on its customers.
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I have had a journey with journey mapping. Through it, I have noticed different types of customer journey maps requiring different inputs and resulting in different outputs/impact over time. I think that there is a time and place for each type of journey map and that it is worth categorizing the kind you’re using or creating in light of what you intend to achieve. I also believe that customer journey maps (and personas and scenarios) if kept as “living assets”, can help give all your teams “line of sight” to your customers, and that they are a powerful catalyst for organizations looking to reinvent themselves as truly customer-centered and empathetic.
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The definition of a customer seems so obvious in B2C relationships that we often don’t bother to define it. Amidst the complexity of B2B relationships, however, this lack of precision can lead to all kinds of confusion and lack of clarity.
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The article below was originally published in June 2018 and was based on a previous article from November 2017. Over the course of 2020 I had the opportunity to return to these ideas, refine them, apply them in new situations, and learn a bunch more from my experiences and also the study of others’. I intend to revisit and provide updates and expansions to some of the ideas in this post over the course of 2021 – and beyond: learning is a lifelong activity and learning is at the heart of innovation.
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This is a republishing of an article that I’ve had around in few places, from the old company blog, to medium, and probably somewhere else. It is good for me to review from time to time the importance and impact of APIs in creating a true customer-centered business. We can probably never say it enough because the “techie” nature of APIs makes them an unusual topic for customer experience and business leaders. But the ultimate users of APIs are humans and the ultimate purpose for them is to facilitate value creation.
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