How Execution Can Kill A Witness

As you are probably aware, there is not a shortage of reading material on business strategy. In fact, the vast majority of business schools, seminars, and coaches want to focus on strategy as well. The problem is that most businesses do not fail due to a poor strategy. No, it is execution that kills most businesses (pun intended).

Small Issue?

As I was going through my voice mail messages one day, I listened to one that started out sounding really good. Unfortunately, it took a slight turn toward the end of the message. The customer complimented us at first, but then asked for my return call to discuss one small issue.

My intuition told me that the one small issue was actually a big one.

Surprise Gift!

To start out, the customer described how he had recently purchased a vehicle from us from out of state. When he had returned home with the vehicle, he began to go through it to become familiar with its operation.

When he got to the glove box, he found a gift from us – an Owners Manual For Life. We place this simple copy of the New Testament in every vehicle that goes through our dealership in an effort to spread the Gospel.

We intentionally remain silent about it at delivery in order to prevent making the customer uncomfortable. We want them to find it later – just like in this case.

To date, I have not had a single complaint with this process. This time was no different. He was very complimentary about the gift and thanked me for it.

Execution Failure!

The problem, he said, was in the execution of the deal itself. I will not go into detail about the deal itself, but will just say that he had expectations that were mostly reasonable. Instead of meeting these expectations with a smooth execution of our sales process, it appears we botched it to a degree.

What should have taken an hour or so took much longer. What should have been a matter of exchanging a couple of documents and funds instead turned into a good amount of confusion and frustration. While some of this was caused by one of his requests, it was our responsibility to handle that request to the best of our ability and to communicate how it would work and how long it would take.

We Dropped The Ball

I wish I could say he had presented us with an unusual situation and we were simply not prepared for it. Unfortunately, this is not completely the case. Instead, we took what could have been a fairly uneventful sales transaction and allowed it to become one that was unpleasant for him.

Granted, he did not mention any anger, rudeness, or dishonesty on our part. He never mentioned anyone grossly mistreating him or trying to take advantage of him. In fact, our attitudes may have been very good. We actually may have smiled the entire time.

That is not the point. No, his frustration came directly from his perception of our inability to execute a fairly simple process without causing him delay or inconvenience. This was not completely true, but because we did not do a great job of explaining the reasons for the delay, he felt we were the sole cause of the frustration.

Patient Customer

Fortunately, this customer was (1) a believer that handled his own emotions as you would hope, (2) very insightful to see the difference between lack of execution and malicious intent, and (3) a patient man that was willing to share his experience with someone interested in learning from it.

Obviously, we will be reviewing exactly what happened in this situation. We will train on the correct process and try to anticipate any potential problems with that process for future customers. We will also learn how to better communicate any hiccups in the execution. This will not be that difficult to correct.

Tempting To Overlook

The biggest problem with this issue is the very simplicity of it. In fact, it is so simple that most of the time we might be tempted to allow the excitement from the compliment regarding our “Christian actions” (Owners Manual For Life) to overshadow the complaint about our execution of the sales transaction process.

We might spend more time patting ourselves on the back for doing our part in spreading the Gospel and ignore the fact that our lack of execution could actually hamper our witness!

Alternative Situation

Let’s think about that for a minute. What if this customer had NOT been a believer? Replay the events in your mind. He goes through the frustration of flying in, buying the vehicle in a frustrating process, and then drives home. While sitting in Atlanta traffic due to our delayed process, he is most certainly cussing us, right?

Now, imagine he is at home and opens the glove box to find the New Testament. What do you think are his thoughts at this point? What is his perception of our “Christian witness” at this point? Have we reinforced what he already thought about Christians, or at best, done nothing to improve his impressions?

Too Easily Bypassed

Folks, this may seem like a small incident. The customer really was not angry with us. He didn’t yell or threaten anything. He was certainly frustrated and wanted to vent about it, but the incident could easily be bypassed as a fluke.

The truth is that this is a HUGE miss for us as Christian business leaders. If this happened here, then it is happening to others – including those to whom we are trying to be a witness. If it is happening to others, then we are underperforming in living out our witness for Jesus. We cannot ignore this issue.

We must commit to rock-solid execution of even the simplest of processes. We cannot afford to ignore it, even for a short period of time. Our witness depends on it!

Have you experienced botched execution as a customer?

What were your feelings?

How good is your business execution in this light?

photo by Joe deSousa; original post date Sept. 17, 2013