At Yiist – Change Agents, we get to speak with various companies and the people running them. While they are all vastly different in their wants and needs, they mostly share a common challenge: improving their business performance.
When we come in for a quick intervision session, the majority of MotivationScans is based on the assumption that we come to develop personae for the marketing people and, together, we come up with the insights that change how the commercial strategy is going to be put to work.
And while that is generally true, it proves to be ‘just’ one, albeit very important, piece of the benefit of running a scan with a team.
In this article, I would like to highlight a different side of an intervision that many haven’t considered as one of the other benefits: a stronger team spirit among the people in a company.
The original objective
Often, a company struggles to connect with its target audience. In many cases, these companies have already put a lot of effort into social media, advertisements, promotional events and what not. At some point, someone came to a Persona Academy based workshop to learn about business development through customer understanding and the decision was made to hire Yiist to come run a MotivationScan.
During a scan, we go through the process of looking at the 5 levels of the company DNA. We distill the priority product-market combinations and we single out the most relevant customer base. We transform a customer profile into a True Persona using our MotivationScanner and in the end, this all can cause what we call a Smart Shift because of some ‘Awesome Insights’.
The thing is: we merely facilitate a process with a methodology to unveil what the people in a company are unable to see with a clear view. Most of the work is done by the people themselves. And what we see happening during that process, is the transformation from departments or silo’s with their own KPI’s, into motivated people with different expertise coming together to reach a common goal: customer satisfaction, business development and company alignment.
People driving business
All of a sudden, and for some this is a magical revelation, business becomes a human experience. Through the search for the human motivation of a customer, participants also start to see the human motivation behind their own company. In almost all cases, the people involved start to talk about how they can be relevant to the customer. And by doing that, they start to see the perspective of others.
By putting the customer central, the personal approach changes how a team regards their customer, but also how they communicate between each other. Instead of ‘business to business’ or ‘business to consumer’, it turns into ‘human to human’.
The beauty is that it does not only apply to the customer, which was the original objective, but the very welcome side-effect is that co-workers share a common goal and speak about it company-wide. It does not take away from accountability or responsibility, but it enforces the team spirit while at the same time this mutual focus improves business development.
So, in conclusion, it is safe to say that what originally started out as ‘merely’ improving marketing, turns out to be something with much more impact in the end.
