Do Business Well

When customers lack the time to buy or use things, suppliers lack customers. Of all the new realities, this may be the most important. Time is no longer just money. Time is life itself. In a highspeed era bristling with demands around the clock, the daily puzzle is, how much time can anyone commit to any particular task? Ergo, customer scarcity is often caused by time scarcity.

As managers see it, their challenge isn’t creating products, services, information, or innovation. Rather, it is finding ways to get customers to select from, to process, and to digest the abundance of supply. The hardest part may be the first step—to cut through the clutter to get customers‘ attention and stay on their shortlist.

That, however, is the view from corporate headquarters. Customers couldn’t care less. They have problems of their own.

Remember the 1970s, when pundits fretted that people might soon die of boredom during the hours and hours of leisure time that automation would inevitably bring? Fat chance.

Instead, what happened is that most people are working longer and harder, perhaps at two or more jobs. After working, sleeping, eating, and doing chores, what’s left of the day? If you’re very lucky, maybe three or four hours in which you can read the paper, surf the Internet, play with your kids, converse with your spouse, pay bills, go to church, play golf—or buy things.

We’re playing a zero-sum game. As long as the hours of the day are limited, any new claim on your time steals it from something else. If you choose to spend extra hours shopping, you miss the book-club meeting or the big game on television. Quite literally, for the purveyor of goods, the competition is not a rival company; rather, it is the infinite number of other possible ways in which a person may choose to spend his or her time.

This also applies to the business customer. In a buyer’s daily welter of meetings, paperwork, protocol, demanding bosses, and office politics, there is no extra time for talking with suppliers who don’t immediately have exactly the right answers. As a result, customers of all kinds have very little patience.

The new market leaders are shrewd psychologists and know that people cope with excess by a process of elimination. Customers who are pressed for time and overstimulated by a plethora of choices will simply tune out what doesn’t catch their collective eye in the first nanosecond and tune in to what does, just as a car radio scans passing stations.

Market leaders also understand that a company unable to retain customers may be annoying them; perhaps it is burdening people with too much or too little information, or forcing them to squander time on irritations like airline overbooking and automated phone gibberish. The leaders adjust accordingly and make it easy, quick, and as pleasant as possible to do business with them.

Taken one at a time, these new realities of customer scarcity sound familiar to any manager. Together, however, they add up to a formidable challenge. What does a company have to do to adjust to the new conditions? As we will see, all it takes is to divert your customer’s attention from the competition; to learn how to operate openly, without secrets; to continuously update your best practices; to innovate constantly without losing focus on the basics; to tighten and focus your flow of information; to resist the temptation to produce to excess; and to help your customer save time. And if all that sounds simple—well, it isn’t.

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