What is Customer Focus, Why is it Important, and How Can You Become Customer Focused?

  02/17/2022

Customers are more likely to do business with you if you are customer-focused. As a consequence being customer oriented may assist you in increasing your sales, business and profits.

What exactly does “customer focus” imply?

To fully grasp what the term “customer focus” refers to and what it means to be customer focused, let us first examine the big picture and how customer focus connects to and varies from “customer orientation." Some may wonder, “Aren’t they the same thing?” at this point. They are not. In fact, in the book E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, he shows that they are, nonetheless, connected. A good place to start understanding how they interact is to define customer orientation (in the context of selling and buying).

The Orientation

When looking for a term, many individuals nowadays use a search engine. A fast Google search yields the Business Dictionary as the top result for defining customer orientation. The definition is quite limited and focuses only on acts. This is beneficial to some amount, but it does not completely answer the puzzle.

The Focus

With the above explanation, customer orientation may be regarded as a strategy that prioritizes the client and his/her interests. Although closely connected, customer focus may be seen as developing a plan for customer orientation for the salesperson or company. Customer orientation is - or appears to be - on a higher level of abstraction than customer focus.

This isn’t always the case, and it’s not always included in definitions inquired from a simple Google search. Being customer focused in the context of sales - and the relationship between the seller and buyer - refers to the vendor taking the customer’s point of view. This entails putting yourself in your customer's shoes and observing things through the eyes of the buyer or consumer. This means experiencing what your client is feeling, thinking about, dreaming about and hoping to attain or become.

Why is it important to be customer-focused?

Now that we’ve defined, discussed and clarified the ideas of customer orientation and customer focus, it’s probably time to go through why being a customer focused makes sense. Putting yourself in the shoes of your clients and seeing things through their eyes is vital since it allows us to better comprehend the client and what is likely to form the best solution for him/her. It takes some of the uncertainty out of the equation and puts the vendor on the same page as the buyer/customer.

Being client focused puts you and your business in a better position to assist your customers in an honest manner. Your client will sense and see that you are putting an additional effort to comprehend their circumstance and truly understand them in order to help them go where they want to go.


This article is part of our
Business Coaching blog series. At Dataczar we talk to a lot of small businesses. We’ve found a few books that we keep recommending time and again. To better help our customers, we’ve added a Reading List for Small Businesses to our website. We encourage every small business owner to read and keep these timeless business books on their office shelf.

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