There's a mission statement hanging on a wall somewhere in America. It says something about putting customers first, about being best-in-class, about delivering outstanding service. No one who works at this company can recite it. Most have never read it.
That's not the problem.
The problem is the CEO who hung it there believes it means something. That framed statement represents a dangerous kind of self-deception that's costing industrial companies revenue, market share, and their competitive future.
The Customer-Focus Charade
Walk into any manufacturing company and you'll hear the same refrain: "We put customers first." The owner says it. The president repeats it. It's probably in the annual report and definitely on the website.
But watch what happens when a customer calls accounting with a billing question. They get policies, office hours, terms and conditions. The back office hides behind procedures designed for their convenience, not the customer's. Does your service team proactively check if customers are achieving the outcomes they bought your product to deliver? Or do they wait for the phone to ring, then try to resolve problems at the least possible cost to the company?
Your customer-facing teams set things up, get clients going, then forget about them until something breaks. Your sales team stays engaged during the pursuit but moves on to the next hot lead after the deal closes. One thing to say you're customer-focused. Another to live it.
I just worked with a client who had an experience with a well-known collaboration tool. They'd over-subscribed—an error caused by unclear subscription terms. The company sent an email saying they'd refund a prorated amount. Reasonable response. Then someone else sent a message saying company policy prohibited refunds, but they'd apply it as a credit next year.
Is that customer-focused? My client asked me to set a reminder 30 days before renewal to cancel and move to another service. It wasn't the money. It was the disregard, the unwillingness to do the right thing. One lousy policy-driven service experience ruined the relationship for life. And my client leaves reviews—brutally candid ones. Now he's a negative influencer for that company.
You cannot hide from delivering bad experiences. You can only fix them or prevent them in the first place.
The Root of the Problem: Technical Thinking Versus Customer Empathy
Here's what's really happening in manufacturing companies: Most leaders are technical people. Engineers, operations experts, product specialists. They're trained to see a one-to-one connection between product and problem. They focus on features and specifications because that's what makes sense to them. They get frustrated when everyone else doesn't see the obvious connection they do.
Linear thinking where feature leads to benefit is as deep as most manufacturing people get into the buyer's world. They rarely think about customer goals in a bigger sense, the business outcome from the buyer's perspective—which is what the customer is really buying.
The result? A fundamental disconnect. You sold a machine. They bought an outcome. Seems obvious, but in practice this type of thinking is rare.
The immediate cause of product focus is a lack of empathy with the buyer, an inability to see things from another's perspective. Technical folks have been conditioned to look down on marketing and anyone dealing in non-technical areas. I call it the Dilbert effect—one result is the focus on product in industrial messaging and communication. Product thinking stems from a lack of understanding, empathy, and being trained in a certain way of thinking.
Look at your own website right now. What's the first thing prospects see when they find your company online? Something about them—their goals, issues, problems, outcomes? Rarely. Usually it's product, product, more product, topped with a quote about the product on a picture of the product.
Check your sales presentations. Are they dominated by features, specifications, and technical information? Or are they about your customers, their goals, their outcomes, their issues?
The Mission Statement as Moral License
This isn't about customer focus versus product focus. It's deeper. American business education taught an entire generation of leaders to optimize for internal metrics rather than customer outcomes. Revenue targets. Margin requirements. Efficiency ratios. Operational excellence measured by how well things run for you, not how well they work for customers.
Mission statements became a way to avoid confronting this misalignment. They're moral licensing—declare yourself customer-focused and you feel permission to act in ways that serve internal convenience. The statement on the wall becomes proof you care, even when your behavior proves otherwise.
Does your back office worry about getting transactions completed on their timeframe, with no human connection to the customer? Do they hide behind policies because following policy is easier than solving for the customer? Does your service team just react when the phone rings? Do your customer-facing teams ensure customers are successful with your product, or do they set things up and disappear?
These are the questions that reveal whether customer focus is real or just words on a wall.
The Modern Stakes
The stakes have fundamentally changed. Buyers now research and switch vendors with a few clicks. According to research by Oracle, 86% of buyers will pay more for better customer experience. Yet only 1% feel vendors consistently meet their expectations.
That gap isn't a marketing problem. It's an existential business issue.
Consider these findings from Corporate Executive Board research: 91% of unhappy customers don't complain—they just leave. Your future B2B buyers are millennials raised on Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. They'll apply those expectations to all their interactions with businesses, including yours.
Research also shows that the majority of customers leave a service interaction less loyal than when they started, according to Oracle. Think about that. Your service team, the people supposedly responsible for keeping customers happy, is making them less loyal with every interaction.
Buyers have never had more choices or easier ways to leave than they do now. It costs five to twenty-five times more to generate a new customer than to keep an existing one, depending on the industry. Yet companies keep focusing on acquisition instead of delivering experiences that make customers want to stay.
What Real Customer Focus Looks Like
Real customer focus requires everyone—from accounting to service to sales—making decisions based on what's in the customer's interest. Because what's in the customer's interest is in your organization's interest too.
It means understanding that buyers don't want to interact with sales representatives as their primary source of research. According to Forrester, by a factor of 3 to 1, B2B buyers say gathering information online on their own is superior to interacting with a sales rep.
It means recognizing that customers are buying outcomes, not products. They're buying the change they need, the problem solved, the goal achieved. Your product is just the vehicle.
It means building systems to ensure customer success, not just customer satisfaction. Planning every step of onboarding so new customers are impressed. Tracking and improving the customer startup process. Measuring loyalty with tools like Net Promoter Score. Continuing to educate customers with helpful information.
The Real Question
Can you recite your company's mission statement right now? If you can, does it frame how your company helps target customers solve problems and achieve goals? Or is it filled with meaningless buzzwords that could apply to any company in any industry?
That mission statement on the wall isn't the solution. It's the symptom of a deeper problem—the belief that declaring something makes it true.
Your customers don't care about the statement on your wall. They care about the experience your company delivers at every interaction. They care about whether you help them achieve their goals or just push your product.
The question isn't whether you have a mission statement. The question is whether anyone in your organization uses it to make decisions. Whether it guides how your accounting team handles billing disputes. Whether it shapes how your service team responds to calls. Whether it determines how your sales team engages with prospects.
Words on a wall are easy. Living those words in every customer interaction is hard. But in an age where buyers can research alternatives and switch vendors with a few clicks, it's also the only thing that matters.
Topics: Inbound Organization, Marketing, Manufacturing, Mission, Company Culture, Leadership, Customer Service
