3 reasons why you need to know your customers better, today.

Before learning the law, you should learn about your customers. Here are 3 reasons why you need to know your customers better, today.

If you're like me, you entered law school with very little work experience and business knowledge. You probably also lacked real-life insights and for that reason, you sought wisdom from the most experienced legal practitioners. 

There is a problem with this approach. It's not customer-centric.

Let me ask you 3 questions to see if, like me, you managed to fix this: Are you curious about the people you want to help? Are you trying to understand how they think, feel and behave when they face a legal problem? Are you open to learning how businesses and organizations operate to better serve them? If you answered no to one of these questions, you need to revisit your strategy to know your customers better.

To build a thriving legal business model, the smartest thing to do is to know your customers. The most successful companies talk to their customers all the time. They create multiple touching points to feel if their customers are engaged and they are not they try to understand why not. They ask for customer's feedback all the time and work hard to solve problems for their customers differently than their competitors.

Have you ever heard of the Empty Chair Strategy by Amazon?  It's a business practice that was established by Jeff Bezos to remind his teams of the most important person who's not in the room:  Their Customer. 

"Obsessing over customer experience is the only long-term defensible competitive advantage." Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Amazon makes it impossible to forget about their customers, by reserving a seat for them at all their meetings. And you? What are you doing to remind yourself of who you're serving?

Your customer should be the starting point for your value proposition in your business model. If you don't know your customers, their problems, as well as their hopes and dreams, how can you generate and deliver value for them? You need to be fully aware of how your customers experience the problems you are hoping to solve for them. This means knowing how they talk about them, how they feel about them, and how they behave when they are confronted with these problems.  This is why you need to know your customers segments first before working on your value proposition.

"Businesspeople don’t just need to understand designers better; they need to become designers." -  Alexander Osterwalder, author of Business Model Generation.

We all have a lot to learn from designers. The most important thing you need to learn is that design is not about graphic design ... It's about processes and workflows that create the perfect user experiences and business models. The Business Model Canva is one of these Design tools that you can't avoid. It is a tool for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. 

More than a tool, the Business Model Canva is a method. It is a design method that is applied to build thriving business models. It is used in leading organizations and start-ups worldwide to generate value for customers and create lasting businesses.

Business plans used to be 80 pages long. Today they should fit on one page! 

At Legal Creatives, we are fans of the Business Model Canva. We use it with our BoLD Community to help our Certified Members structure and grow their business in the Legal Design space. With a focus on helping them delivering value to their customers, we cover all the areas of the Business Model Canva to ensure maximum success for our members as they structure or grow their business.

What's really special about the BoLD Community is that it's the one and only entirely focused on the business of Legal Design. 

With the help of the community, everything becomes possible in a BoLD session. The interactions are world-class as they help members find business opportunities, make new business contacts, and learn from each other's businesses. 

We already hosted quite a few sessions this year so visit your BoLD Member's area to catch up with the content and material - if you're not Certified yet - join the Certification Program here to be a part of this BoLD Community. 

Make sure this week to work on your business - and not just in the business - the Business Model Canva is a great reference. Although you may find it difficult to be so synthetic when it comes to talking about your business, I encourage you to keep trying!  Lik for everything else in Design: Simplicity is key, but it's hard. It takes time, but it's worth it. 

- Tessa Manuello