Inder Guglani compares creating a vision with being a
movie: You need to be able to close your eyes and see the
movie or vision and how it will
come together.
“If you see it, you can describe
it to everyone and get them
excited,” he says. “If you cannot
describe your vision, you don’t
have a vision.”
Guglani’s focus on vision has
helped grow Guru.com, an
online marketplace he founded
in 2000 for freelance talent in
creative markets, to 2007 revenue of $18.4 million. The company employs 20 people and
10 contractors and has more
than 100,000 freelancer profiles
on its Web site.
Smart Business spoke with
the founder and CEO of
Guru.com about why your
customer is the key to forming a successful vision.
Q. How do you create a vision?
Understand who your customer is and what their needs
are. Focus on their needs today
and understand how these needs
are going to evolve over time.
You need to be able to see it
before you go directing other
people for the achieving of the
vision. If you’re wrong in your
research and vision, you’re not
going to get the results you’ve
desired. But that’s the risk you
take and what drives you to
work harder in understanding
your customers better.
Have a finger on the pulse of
all the interaction that is occurring between the customer and
personnel who are interacting
with the customer. You can
understand the issues the customers are dwelling on. Talk
directly to customers and understand how they’re evolving and where they plan to be
in the future.
Q. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of customer
interactions?
Read the interaction, at least
all that is documented. Talk to
the folks who are interacting
with the customer. Go out on a
sample basis because you can’t
afford the time of meeting every
customer, but pick a few folks
who you believe have a representative profile of the
average customer.
Every interaction is a
data point, and the more
and more data points
[you have], you either validate your vision or find
contradiction, and if
there’s contradiction, you
have to get to the bottom
of it and resolve it. If your
vision is a good one, then
every issue should either
have a resolution today
or be resolved sometime
in the future.
Q. How do you live
your vision and sell it to
employees and customers?
If your vision is a good one,
the selling should become easy.
If you’re able to sell the customer on the long-term vision,
then your confidence has
already grown to bring that
vision to your company and sell
it to employees.
It goes from understanding
customer needs and developing
a vision, expressing the vision,
selling it to the customer, bringing the vision into the company,
explaining and deriving an operating plan of the vision, selling
that plan to employees, and then showing how they benefit
from executing the plan.
Make sure your employees
understand your customers
today as well as how your customers will be in the future. It’s
your job to bring the customers’
needs through your vision to the
tables, desks and minds of your
people so they can execute on it.