3 Stages to Onboard Successfully: Get to Know Your Company, Team, and Customer
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Introduction
An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. — Jack Welch, Former CEO of General Electric
In our last article, Clarify Your Role and Responsibilities, we defined the first stage of the Eastan Onboarding Framework (EOF) explaining the importance of clearly defining your role and responsibilities with all of your key stakeholders.
In our next stage, Know Your Company, our focus shifts to getting to know your company, your team, your customer, and other critical elements. We will employ the 5C Role Onboard Framework, a framework that will help you develop and gain a universal understanding — an omniscience if you will — on the internal and external factors that define your company and impacts its performance.
The 5Cs in the 5C Role Onboard Framework focus on the following areas:
- Company (Capabilities): Your company and its core competencies: human, operational, financial, technical, and infrastructure capabilities.
- Customer: Your customer’s success is your success! Therefore, get to know your customer, who they are, how they engage with your company, their pain points, and desired solution.
- Competition: Your competitors: who they are, their strengths, weaknesses, and perceived strategy/focus areas, and how they compete. This is Bird vs. Magic, Coke vs. Pepsi time! Knowing your competition well directly impacts your ability to defend your turf and to win over and serve your customers.
- Collaborators: Review your company’s collaborators and the influence and impact they have on your company, customers, and their business. As you identify your company’s collaborators, think through their context, purpose, relationship status, and behaviors.
- Conditions: Lastly, consider the external forces and factors that can influence your company’s environment. These elements can be analyzed through the PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technology, Legal, Environmental) lens.
An understanding of the 5Cs along with a deeper understanding of your role will provide you with a very effective onboarding platform. And for all of you physiology fans, think of it like this: By employing the 5C Role Onboard Framework, you will enhance your knowledge of your environment (Company, Conditions, and Collaborators) and its response to stimuli (Customers and Competition).
Please use the EOF_Worksheet to assist you in capturing this information. Now, let’s discuss each of the steps in the 5C framework in more detail.
1. Company
In the first step of the 5C Role Onboard Framework, you will develop an understanding of your Company and its Capabilities. In executing this step, take an inward look at your company understanding its intrinsic qualities and evaluating its core competencies, performance to date, and areas for improvement.
As you think about your company, focus on the following areas:
● Culture: Company culture consists of the shared values, attributes, and characteristics of an organization. Company culture is the personality of your company, its behaviors, motivations, reward system, and ultimately, what makes it tick. In evaluating company culture, look at the style and quality of management, approach, and manager of communications, individual behaviors, relationships, values, and the environment, as a whole.
I would argue that understanding your company’s culture is an important step to increase your effectiveness when onboarding to a new role…the better your understanding of the culture, the more effective you’ll be in your work. After working for companies in High Tech, Retail, Supply Chains, and International Travel, I can assure you that each company had its own, unique culture. To learn more about this in depth, I recommend reading The Culture Question by Randy Grieser.
● Operational: Look at your company’s operational infrastructure — the existence and maturity of business processes, the effectiveness of the organizational structure, performance management processes/measures, and overall corporate governance.
● Financial: Know your company’s financial health. This is not just for our people in Finance. A strong understanding of your company’s finances — i.e. the Balance Sheet, Income (P&L) Statement, and Cash Flow Statements — will give you insight on the company’s financial health, its priorities, and its strategic imperatives.
● Technical and Infrastructure: Evaluate your company’s key capabilities and assets including brands and intellectual property, technology and data systems, and supporting skills and leadership.
Most company information is publicly available on your company’s website, investor presentations, annual filings, and other business sites (e.g. Crunchbase, Hoovers, MarketResearch.com). You can also review internal reports to understand how your company evaluates its performance and what metrics they use. If your company is private, look for your company’s intranet site or other knowledge repository.
Additionally, you should read over industry analyst (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, IDC) reports to understand how your company’s performance is evaluated externally and what analysts suggest as areas of improvement. The value of analysts is that they are in an optimal position to provide an objective perspective given their exposure and interactions with all the key players and business functions in your industry.
Utilize the 2_1_Company tab in the EOF_Worksheet as a template for capturing your company details.
2. Customer
The next step in the 5C Role Onboard Framework is to put on your customer shoes and get to know your Customer — understand who they are, how they engage with your company, their pain points, and desired solution. The better you understand your customer’s needs and concerns, the higher the likelihood that you will be able to address their concerns with the most meaningful and measurable impact.
You can typically frame and understand your Customer by answering the following questions:
1. Who is your target customer (By demographics, psychographics, and/or behavioral traits)?
2. What does their end-to-end journey look like from discovery to retention?
3. What problems are they looking to address?
4. Why do they buy from your company?
5. How and when do they buy? What are their triggers and motivators?
6. What makes them feel good about buying and using your company’s products/services?
7. What are their objections to buying from your company? What are viable substitutes or alternatives?
8. What do they think about your company? What are their expectations? How well are these expectations met?
9. What do they think about your competitors?
Interview or simply talk to your customers to figure this out. (Yes, it’s that simple!) Additionally, evaluate customer feedback and your Win/Loss reports, which can typically be gathered by reading customer reviews and having discussions with sales and customer support teams.
Utilize the 2_2_Customer tab in the EOF_Worksheet as a template for capturing your company details.
3. Competition
The next step in the 5C Role Onboard Framework focuses on evaluating your Competition by understanding their strengths, weaknesses, perceived strategy/focus areas, and your company’s competitive differentiators. When reviewing the Competition, think broadly about your competitors, and consider all current direct and indirect competitors as well as potential competitors.
As a point of clarification, we define competitor types as follows:
● Direct Competitors: Direct Competitors refers to any competitor that offer the same type of solution (product/service) and target the same kinds of customers as you do (e.g., Lenovo vs. Apple).
● Indirect Competitors: Indirect Competitors refers to any competitor whose solution is different from yours but could potentially satisfy the same customer need and reach the same goal. While they are not directly competing with you, indirect competitors compete with your brand and are fighting for your customers’ attention (e.g., Microsoft vs. IBM developing OS/2).
● Potential Competitors: Potential competitors are those competitors who do the same thing that your company does and target the same kinds of customers but are not selling in your market area and are not likely to do so. Potential competitors could be your direct competition if they decided to enter your market but either do not have the infrastructure or have chosen to ignore this market. (e.g., Hyundai vs. Mercedes-Benz)
As you review your company’s competition, evaluate the following characteristics for each identified competitor:
● Strengths (real and perceived)
● Weaknesses (real and perceived)
● Target Market
● Financial health and profit pools by segment
● Business model(s)
● Strategies
This information can be learned from a review of your competitor’s website, public investor presentations, annual filings, analyst market research reports, and other business sites (e.g. Crunchbase, Hoovers, MarketResearch.com).
Next, think about how you compete against your competition noting your differentiators, current strategies/approaches, and potential gaps in your offerings.
Utilize the 2_3_Competitor tab in the EOF_Worksheet as a template for capturing your company details.
4. Collaborators
Now, familiarize yourself with your company’s collaborators, the individual parties that assist your company in servicing their customers. Collaborators can include suppliers, business allies, partners, and government/community leaders.
As you think through your company’s collaborators, think through their context, purpose, behaviors, and your company’s relationship. A suggested approach to best understand your company’s collaborators is to model out your company’s value chain and in each step of the value chain, answer the following questions:
● Who are your collaborator(s)?
● Where in your value chain do they operate? What context do they operate?
● How do you measure their efforts?
● Where could/should they improve?
● Why do they partner with your company?
Also, think about what collaboration partner relationships are missing and should be added as you think of strategic moves to address any gaps or blind spots in your business.
Utilize the 2_4_Collaborator tab in the EOF_Worksheet as a template for capturing your company details.
5. Conditions
Lastly, it is important to consider the external forces and factors that can influence the environment in which your business operates. These elements can be analyzed through the PESTLE lens. The PESTLE lens provides coverage into areas that may affect a business where the business is limited in its control.
The PESTLE lens focuses on the following areas:
● Political: Political/government/regulatory factors that may influence the economy and/or the industry (e.g., new administrations, regulations).
● Economic: Micro- and macro-economic factors that can affect the market favorably or unfavorably (e.g., lowered interest rates, recessions).
● Social: The social environment of the market including determinants like cultural trends, demographics, and population analytics (e.g., the aging of the Baby Boomer generation).
● Technology: Innovations in technology that could impact your industry’s operations or the market favorably or unfavorably (e.g., heightened data security requirements, eCommerce).
● Legal: External and internal laws and policies that may influence the business environment (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley).
● Environmental: Variables regarding the physical environment or any direct consequences (e.g. consumer health, climate change).
Utilize the 2_5_Conditions tab in the EOF_Worksheet as a template for capturing your company details.
After Dinner Mints
As is our custom, enclosed are a few after-dinner mints to help inspire you and drive your thoughts and actions:
● Steve Jobs: An incredible book! I was on a vacation in Hawaii (…Hawaii!), started reading, and couldn’t put this book down. This biography offers great philosophy and intel on critical success factors for companies.
● Traction: Another great book that provides a practical system for evaluating and running your business. Additionally, it provides extremely useful templates that can be downloaded.
● The Culture Question : I mentioned this earlier when discussing evaluating your Company, but I would argue an understanding of your company’s culture is the secret ingredient for success in most workplaces. This book goes into great detail about understanding company culture — the elements, the intricacies, the personality types — and how to work effectively.
● Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance: This is a tough read but a must and worthwhile read full of sizable nuggets of wisdom. While this is considered the bible of strategy, you will need to read this in doses (with plenty of caffeine). Competitive Advantage contains a lot of theory and principles on business strategy that still translates today — which says a lot considering this book was written in 1985.
Conclusion
The Eastan Onboarding Framework (EOF) seeks to address the challenges of onboarding to a new role or function. In this article, we focused on the second stage, Know Your Company, detailing the key steps to know and understand your company and the internal/external dynamics influencing its success employing the 5C Role Onboard Framework.
The 5Cs in the 5C Role Onboard Framework focus on the following areas:
- Company (Capabilities): Your company’s core competencies: human, operational, financial, technical, and infrastructure capabilities.
- Customer: Your customer — who they are, how they engage with your company, their pain points, and desired solution.
- Competition: Your competitors — who they are, their strengths, weaknesses, and perceived strategy/focus areas, and how they compete.
- Collaborators: Your company’s collaborators — their role in your value chain, status, behaviors and impact they have on your company, customers, and their business.
- Conditions: Lastly, consider the external forces and factors that can influence your company’s environment. These elements can be analyzed through the PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technology, Legal, Environmental) lens.
As a reminder, be sure to utilize the EOF Worksheet. The goal of the worksheet is to provide you with a template to jump start your efforts and assist you as you complete the recommended actions in each of the sections. Please download the template and edit as you see fit. If you have any further questions, or would like a free initial consultation, please contact Ron at: Ron@EastanConsulting.com
About the author
Ronald (Ron) Berry is an international executive with extensive global experience and success in the B2B and B2C digital transformation space in a variety of industries and for multiple companies.
