Customer-Centric Is a Decision, Not a Slogan — with Michael Skriver

"I Want to See That in Your Decisions"

Somewhere in Michael Skriver's career, a new CEO stood in front of three thousand people and told them they had no clue how to sell. They were a bunch of traders.

Michael's assessment, years later: he was right.

What that CEO taught next is the part worth stealing. You say you're customer-centric. Fine. I want to see it in your decisions. Otherwise it's a slogan.

I've been in a lot of rooms where customer centricity was on the wall and nowhere else. It's one of those phrases that costs nothing to say and everything to actually do, because doing it means giving something up — margin, speed, a comfortable KPI, a leader's afternoon. What Michael and I ended up circling for most of our conversation is what the giving-up looks like in practice.

Start with who's in the room

Michael spent years running complex B2B sales where every deal involved two sellers: a technical person and a commercial person. The technical seller is usually a scientist. White coat, credentials, no sales training. The commercial seller may have no sales training either — as Michael pointed out, in much of Europe there's simply no schooling for B2B sales.

Most organizations let the commercial person lead and use the technical person as backup artillery. Michael inverted it. Prepare as a team, then let the technical person do the digging.

His reasoning is uncomfortable and correct. Everybody knows the guy in the tie is dangerous, especially if his title is long. The white coat gets trusted. If discovery is the part of the process where you actually need to hear the truth, send the person the buyer will tell the truth to.

That's a decision. It costs the commercial seller some ego and some control. It's also the difference between finding out what the problem is and finding out what the buyer thinks you want to hear.

Then look at who's willing to be exposed

We spent a while on executive sponsorship, which most enterprise organizations claim to do and few actually do.

Michael's version has a specific tell: the sponsor has to put their own credibility at stake. It's easy to sit at your desk and approve an account plan. It's a different thing to go stand in front of a client and own something.

He tried to install sponsors for the top five global clients and found the hard part wasn't recruiting them — it was articulating why they should do it. If you come from sales it's obvious. If you come from operations or finance, it isn't, and Michael's honest admission is that he didn't fully crack it.

I'd add the other half: sponsorship only works if the account team is ready to support it. Your executive sponsor is walking into a CFO conversation tomorrow and needs ten minutes of context today. A lot of reps can't produce that on demand, because they're buried in the urgent and haven't thought about being ready for the call that comes out of the blue.

But when it works, it's the strongest customer-centricity accelerant there is, because it carries client knowledge to the top floor. Leadership starts making decisions with a live voice of the customer instead of last year's bias.

Then check what you're measuring

Michael described a team whose incentive was built around freight cost per kilo to the client. So that's what got discussed — when the shipment left the factory, what it cost per kilo to move.

What barely got discussed: whether it arrived. Whether it arrived with the full set of legal documents, without which the client can't clear it and can't use it.

Nobody in that system was behaving badly. The metric was old, it was tied to bonus, and once a number is tied to bonus, nobody questions it. It just sits there quietly steering commercial decisions.

This is the systems-level thinking most sellers never develop. Your customer contact doesn't live in a vacuum either. They live inside a set of incentives that explains behavior you'd otherwise find baffling.

Then learn to hear what people can't say

Years ago I was working with a division of a Japanese company. The general manager said he needed help with sales productivity. I laid out five projects and told him I saw room for substantial improvement.

He looked at me and said, "I want you to do a good job."

I misread it and doubled down. I said we'd dramatically improve his sales productivity.

He said it again. "I want you to do a good job."

The third time through I finally heard him. Modest improvement was great. Moderate improvement would be good. Dramatic improvement might reflect poorly on his peers. He couldn't explain the cultural piece to me directly — I don't think it was done — but he gave me enough to work with, three times, until I caught it.

Michael has the sharper version of this story, told from the other side. He went into a Japanese meeting with an energetic boss who sat on the soft couch making small talk for forty-five minutes and finally cracked. Can we please talk business?

The meeting ended seven minutes later. They never came back.

The small talk wasn't preamble. It was the meeting. They were deciding whether he was a trustworthy person, and he told them.

Later Michael found himself in front of sixty people when a counterpart came over with a beer and asked if he wanted to sing karaoke. Not an invitation. A test. If you're willing to look silly next to me, we'll have more meetings.

He sang. He says they were fantastic. He also says the bond from that night is one he still feels, because it got real.

And then the sentence you'll hear everywhere

Michael has worked in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America, and in every single one of them somebody told him the same thing.

Our market is different. Competition here is fiercer. Price here is lower.

It's never true and it's always sincere. So I asked him what people are actually saying when they say it.

His answer took about two seconds. Listen to me. Understand me.

That's the whole thing. Not a market condition — a request. They want to be heard. They want to be understood. They're human beings like everybody else, and the sentence they've reached for is the only one that reliably gets a seller to slow down.

Which brings it back around. Customer centricity isn't a value. It's a series of decisions about who leads the discovery, whose credibility is on the line, what you measure, and whether you're willing to sit on the couch for forty-five minutes without asking to talk business.

Michael Skriver is at futuresalesglobal.com. The full conversation is on the Thoughts on Selling podcast.