This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Earning the Right to Win: Build Immense Customer Loyalty, with Bill McDermott, CEO, ServiceNow, Former CEO, SAP SE, and Author, Winner’s Dream
I learned a lot of lessons about business by being a young man working in a delicatessen, eventually owning it, and I learned that the most important lesson of all is to focus on your customer. You have to have immense empathy for the customer. When I ran my small business, I learned quickly that my base of customers was in effect my future. And I tried to understand my customers by segmenting my marketplace. On one hand, I had senior citizens that really did prefer to have things delivered to their home as opposed to going out of their house. So I offered a delivery service, which my competition didn’t. Secondly, my base really was blue collar workers. I was in a blue collar working neighborhood, and I respected that. And I could relate to that since I grew up in a blue collar home and my dad was a blue collar worker.
So I try to understand what really added value to their week and simply put, they got paid on Fridays and they were very big spenders, very generous with their money. But by Sunday morning, they had already run out of money in a lot of cases. So I gave them credit and they could shop in my store week to week, get whatever they wanted and write it down in a little notebook on credit. And I built immense loyalty with that base.
And then finally the big challenge was, I was between a supermarket and 7-Eleven, and by 7-Eleven was the high school. So I had to get kids to walk an extra block and a half to come to my store instead of go to 7-Eleven. So I teach in the book the importance of knowing your competition, what they do and what they don’t do.
One day I go down to 7-Eleven and I see this long line of kids, only four kids in the store. So I said to one kid, why are you waiting outside? He said, “Well, they probably think we’re going to take things.” Aha. An aha moment. I said, “You all come down to my store. I’ll let you in 40 at a time,” which I did. And to underscore the importance of knowing your base and treating your customer with immense respect, one kid stands in front of me and says, “Bill, when we want to be treated with dignity and respect and have good food, we come to your deli. And when we want to steal stuff, we go to 7-Eleven.” So I knew who my base was. I serviced them well. And as a result, built a pretty good little business.
Ultimately the deli got sold when I was 21 years old because I never really had any ambitions to franchise or stay in the deli. On the other hand, I was looking for a way out of Long Island and a way into the big city, because my dream was always to compete in the world of business and to be a leader someday of consequence.