Key Takeaways:

• Make sure you define your “customer” clearly and correctly — beware of serving your “employees” instead of your true “customer”.

• There are three general customer value proposition strategies:

  • Operational excellence focuses on streamlining operations and reducing costs.

  • Product differentiation focuses on creating a product or service that stands out from the crowd.

  • Customer intimacy focuses on personalizing a product or service based on a customer’s needs and cultivating a long-term relationship with customers.

• No matter which customer value proposition strategy is used, the basic aspects of a product or service, customer relationship, and brand identity need to be maintained to appeal to those you serve.

• Ministry organizations will usually choose to focus on customer intimacy — getting to know the people they serve so they can tailor their services to their needs and create ongoing relationships with them.

Resources:

• Art of Manliness Podcast Episode 518: The Quest for a Moral Life

• Competitive Strategies: Operational Excellence, Customer Intimacy, Product Leadership

Transcript

Hi, church leaders! Welcome to the CEO Pastor podcast. My name is Cindy and I am your host for today's episode. My goal is to provide the management expertise every church leader needs to produce the ministry experience every church leader wants. We'll skip the jargon and cliches and focus on ideas that will help you accomplish the church's mission in your unique ministry context. Ready? Let's go!

Were you able to solidify your vision and mission statement, your core values, and your strategic themes and results? Hopefully you've had a chance to finalize those or at least get a good start on them.

Today's episode is going to talk about the beneficiary or stakeholder perspective of the strategy map. So, normally, this perspective in a business context would be called the customer perspective. So, in this episode, we're essentially discussing the people that you're planning to serve in your organization.

Define Your “Customer”

One of the most important things you need to do in your organization is define who your customer is. We all know that we only have so much time, energy, and money to go around so we can't just serve everyone unfortunately. We have to narrow down who we're serving. And, especially for people in a traditional ministry context in a church, I would like to propose that your customer or your beneficiary is not your congregation. Not sure if that's a controversial statement or not -- I hope it's not -- but a lot of churches... and I did do a search for other strategy maps specifically for churches online and I found that a lot of them define their beneficiary or their stakeholder or their "customer" as the people in their congregation and I would like to suggest that it's not the people in your congregation. I would suggest that those people come later in your strategy map. They are your "employees", your crew, your volunteers, who require a completely different approach in dealing with their needs.

For example, in my business, I know that I have to serve my crew, serve my employees, but I know they're not my customers. My customers are the people who are buying oysters from me. And the way I approach serving the needs of my employees and making sure they have everything they need in order to accomplish the job, the mission of our oyster company is far different than the approach that we're going to take when we're trying to serve our customers. So it's very important when you are doing this particular section of your strategy map to clearly define who your customer is.

If you are in a traditional church organization setting, you may have found yourself accidentally defining your customer as your congregation. And while you can have programs and aspects of what you do that can benefit your organization, that should probably not be your main focus since the mission of the church is to go out into the world and make disciples. There's a definite element of going out into the world. And if you're always feeding yourself... I could train my crew all day long but, if we never packed an oyster, that's not going to get us very far. And the great news is there are so many needs in this world that it really shouldn't be hard for you to pick a particular group or need in your community that can benefit those people and choose that approach based on the talents, the gifts, the skills that your congregation already has. That's why I've been emphasizing so strongly the SWOT: the strengths, weaknesses. If you know where your congregation tends to shine, then that will guide you in determining who you're going to serve in your community.

If your congregation has absolutely no interest in sports, for example, then there's no point starting a sports league for the local youth around your church. That's not going to be a very good fit for your congregation. They may be more artistic and that will be a better fit for your congregation. There's always a niche that you can fit into. There's always a need that you can plug into as an organization or a congregation in order to make the connections that you want to make with your community in order to reach people for Christ.

So that's the first thing that you need to do, is clearly define who your customer is. And I would encourage you to do that based on the needs of the community around you and also based on the capabilities of your crew, of your congregation, of your volunteers.

Define Your Customer Value Proposition Strategy

The second thing that you need to do is define your customer value proposition strategy. Now, that's a little fancy but I'll explain. This is a business concept that outlines the attributes of the product or service that you're trying to put out there, also the relationship that you want to have with the people that you serve, and the image that you want to have in your community and with the people that you're serving.

So there's three different generic strategies for going about doing that. The first one is called operational excellence and that's typically found in businesses more so than not for profits, and that's a focus on the price, the quality, the selection, and the time that it takes to acquire the service. And the goal is to have people see you as the place to go if they are a smart shopper.

So a great example of operational excellence would be Walmart. They've got great selection, low prices, decent quality for the price, you can get in and get out -- it's like one stop shop. Another good example of this would be McDonald's. You know when you go to McDonald's, you're going to get a consistent product. You're not going to have... you know, you're not going to be able to go in and order filet mignon or escargot. You know that there's a limited menu. But you know that when you go in there, you can expect a certain level of service, a certain quality of what they're serving for food, you know that the prices are going to be less than filet mignon, and you know that it's going to be quick service. So that's an example of operational excellence. They're focused more on the attributes of the product or service, specifically the price, quality, selection, and time associated with accessing that product or service.

The second customer value proposition strategy is called product leadership. And this is where you want to be seen as best in class. So the focus in this particular strategy is the selection or functionality of what you're selling or your service and also the time, how quickly you can deliver, how quickly you can steer your customer in the right direction, how easy it is for that customer to decide what exactly they need from you. So they focus on unique products that push the envelope.

So an example of this could be Apple computers. They're looking to be best in class in computers. They're always, you know, putting a little twist on everything all the time, trying to stand out from the crowd. They don't want to be just like everyone else. They want to have a great selection but give people the functionality that they want and have a good, consistent product. So those are the focus for the product leadership.

But the one that I think that a lot of ministry organizations would probably be best to focus on is called customer intimacy. And the focus of that strategy is to become a trusted brand. Now, don't freak out about the word "brand". Essentially, unfortunately, in this day and age, everybody is a brand, whether you're an individual or you're a company or you're an organization of whatever sort. There's a certain understanding of who you are as a person, as an organization. And the word for that is your brand. You get known for certain things. You get known for how you approach life, how you interact with people, what kind of relationships you have, but I really do think that this is probably going to be the focus for the vast majority of the people listening: the customer intimacy value proposition strategy. And the focus of that particular strategy is on personalized service and building long-term relationships with people. So you need to get to know the people that you're trying to serve and cultivate a relationship with them that... it's not just they're gonna show up at your door and you're never going to see them again. You're trying to cultivate a relationship so you can continue to learn about their needs and do what you can to help those people find answers to their needs.

Don’t Neglect the Basics

Now, with these three different customer value propositions, yes, they have their particular focus, but that doesn't mean you can just throw everything to the wayside... all the other aspects of your attributes, relationship, and image. Even if you're doing, say, for example, a customer intimacy strategy, you also have to make sure that your services are safe. If you're working with children, there's a pretty basic minimum there that people want to know that the people who are working with those children are safe to be around and that they're not going to take advantage of those vulnerable children. Like, you can't just toss everything to the side. You need to have all those basics in place. Your specific focus when you're trying to decide on your objectives for your strategy needs to be, especially for the customer intimacy strategy, is personalized service -- getting to know the people that you're trying to serve -- and building long-term relationships with them.

Decide How You’ll “Compete”

Now, just thinking back on some of my personal church experiences, especially in the late 90s, early 2000s as a youth, I think sometimes that the church was trying to do more of the product leadership strategy, the unique products that push the envelope. There was a big push on to, especially with youth ministry, to have it be, like, big and bold and big concerts with fancy lights and lasers and smoke machines and all that kind of stuff and try to keep up with the entertainment that was going on around that same time like having the coolest bands that were doing rap and, like, a mixture of ska and all the different things that were a big deal then and trying to be in that same vein as what people my age were tending to find in the secular world, what was drawing them in. And I would suggest that, when you're thinking about how to reach the people that you want to serve, that, yes, you can take that approach, but you may want to consider more what they can't find elsewhere.

What can you as an organization offer to people that they can't easily find somewhere else? Like, it's not hard for people nowadays to find entertainment. I can pick up my iPhone or iPad or whatever device I happen to have and watch practically any movie I want from whatever streaming service that I have access to. If I want to listen to music, I have streaming services for that. If I want to learn something, I have YouTube. I can look practically anything up that I want. So if you take an approach when you're serving your people of we have to entertain them in order to get them in the door to serve them, perhaps.... But do you really want to be competing with all of that other stuff that causes so much noise in our culture? Is that really what your people that you're serving... is that really what they need? Because they can find that anytime, anyplace. As long as they have a device, they can find it. But what is it that people that you're serving are really looking for? Like, these are harder questions if... especially if you're going with the customer intimacy strategy, it's going to take longer to pinpoint what the real needs are of the people that you're serving and to figure out how exactly you can serve those people and build a relationship of trust with them. That takes time. That's not going to come overnight.

Opportunities for Church Ministry

I was listening to a podcast episode this week from The Art of Manliness podcast. Now, you might say why are you listening to The Art of Manliness podcast? You're not a guy. Don't have to be a guy in order to listen to the podcast! I find the ideas that they talk about on the podcast very interesting. And the episode I was listening to was called The Quest for a Moral Life. And I'll link it in the show notes and also on the website in the resources so you can listen to it if you'd like.

But the gentleman who was being interviewed on the podcast, he was talking about a lot of interesting ideas about things that our society, especially wealthier Western societies like in North America and Europe, what our societies seem to be missing and the things that they're using to fill those things that are missing and some of the bigger challenges that we're going to have to face as a society. He was talking specifically about how we're experiencing more tribalism and breakdown of relationships as a society. There's less trust between neighbors. There's less trust in society, especially between people who have different views on things, and he was saying that one of the biggest challenges for society moving forward is trying to figure out how to bridge those gaps.

But he was talking about other issues as well that I found, when I was listening to it, I was thinking, "Well, those are places that the church could step in." And depending on your context, you may be drawn more to one aspect of what he was discussing than another. He did mention in the podcast some of the ways that religion in general (he wasn't trying to be specific about a particular religion), but how religion in general could take part in trying to revive some of the community that we've lost as we've become a more individualistic society. So if you're looking for some ideas, you may be able to find some on that podcast episode that I'm going to link.

Next Steps

So I would encourage you to, this week, think about who exactly you're trying to serve and define that person or group of people very clearly based on the needs in your community and the abilities and talents that you find within your organization. Try to make it as specific as possible if you can because it's a lot easier to figure out what you're doing if you're specific about who you're serving.

And second, choose between the three strategies: the operational excellence, the product leadership, and customer intimacy. Think about where your energy needs to be directed in order to execute that particular strategy, what your organization needs to do in order to embody the value that that strategy inherently focuses on.

And after you think those things through, I would encourage you to write between three and five objectives that you would like to achieve and include in your strategy map to cultivate the relationship that you're wanting to have with your beneficiaries or stakeholders, whether that's based on the price, the quality, the selection of your services, whether that's on being unique and pushing the envelope with product leadership, or whether that's in personalized service and building long-term relationships and becoming that trusted place where people go in order to experience the way that you choose to serve.

On Our Next Episode

And the objectives... the three to five objectives that you choose, we will work towards the next step in the strategy map: the stewardship perspective. And once you have an idea of what your objectives are for the beneficiary and stakeholder perspective that we've discussed today, that will lead into the stewardship perspective: how you use your assets and your finances in order to accomplish those objectives that you're looking to achieve with your beneficiaries and stakeholders, the people that you're trying to serve. So I look forward to discussing that with you next week.

Thank-you for joining me for today's episode of CEO Pastor podcast. I hope you discovered an idea that you can apply in your unique ministry context. Head over to ceopastor.com for more resources and meet up with me and other church leaders on social media for further discussion. Any questions or suggestions? Email me at podcast (at) ceopastor.com. And don't forget to share, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to help spread the word that managing ministry better makes ministry better.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai