Customers or Clients? DSD’s New Mission Statement
We recently engaged the services of a top marketing firm, BottomLine Marketing, to help us get our marketing activities into sharper focus. Our self-image had worked well for us for over a decade, but had become dated, and was no longer in complete alignment with our products, services and our world view in 2013. In a nutshell, our Mission, Vision and Values Statements needed a tune-up.
We are very proud of our new Mission Statement. Here it is:
“DSD Business Systems’ mission is to make our clients more successful by helping them become more efficient, effective and self-reliant. We will do this by listening and responding to our client’s needs and providing them with the highest level of business and information management products and services. DSD Business Systems will apply its expertise to help our clients deliver their goods and services more profitably and with greater consistency so they can spend more time improving the relationship with their customers. Our priority is to solve problems quickly and we will do whatever it takes to provide the right answer, even at the expense of our short term profitability. DSD Business Systems will proactively bring our clients leading edge solutions so they can maintain their competitive edge. Most importantly, we always treat our clients like family. That is our promise to you.”
Customers vs. Clients?
One of the seminal changes in our new Mission Statement is a seemingly inert one – “customers” are now “clients”. We made this change because we believe that customers are those who buy products from a seller, but clients are those who buy knowledge and insights. We don’t want companies to purchase goods from us because we have them in stock and they are priced right. We want to create long-term relationships with companies who value how we help them, and not what we hand them.
In short, we don’t want Customers, we want Clients.
I think that it’s okay for the software publishers who we represent to sell to customers. But we believe that it’s important for us to differentiate ourselves from those same software publishers because we believe that we have a much more qualitative (and different) relationship with our clients than our publishers do. No matter how hard our publishers try to assert themselves as the most important relationship that our clients have with a software provider, their business model simply doesn’t allow them to familiarize themselves and understand as much about your business needs as we do.
We take the time to understand your most closely held business processes, and to build a software solution that will embrace those processes. We take the time to understand what your key performance indicators are, and how your business growth is affected by them. We take the time to identify your special sauce (your differentiators) and to make sure that they are fully built-in to your business software. We take the time to recommend improvements to your internal processes, based on our industry knowledge. We take the time to understand what the full financial impact of your new software will be to you, and we do our best to let you know what the associated ROI will be. In short, we want to be your trusted advisor.
Software publishers and most ERP vendors can’t or won’t do this for you. We will, and that is our promise to you.
Written by Doug Deane, President & CEO of DSD Business Systems.
