Diane at Dartmouth
Companies must always focus on the customer. That means that in any meeting, if the customer is not mentioned within any 15 minute segment, the meeting must stop. This is great advice and one of multiple pointers that Diane Kuehn, VisionPoint Marketing’s President and CEO, learned last week at the Tuck Executive Education program at Dartmouth.
From May 1st through 6th, Kuehn joined 44 other business leaders from around the U.S. in an executive training program called “Implementing Your High-Performance Strategy.” As the name suggests, this taught leaders how to refine and implement their business strategy. Kuehn won the scholarship awarded by the Carolinas Minority Supplier Development Council in recognition of her accomplishments as one of North Carolina’s top minority business leaders.
The schedule was grueling with classes running from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. but was also incredibly rewarding, Kuehn says. At the top part of the week, accounting was a heavy focus along with understanding how banks determine whether or not you are a good credit risk. Here are some of the other gems that she gathered from the subsequent classes:
Understand What the Real Value Proposition Is To Our Clients
“This required a lot of peeling back the onion,” Kuehn says. “But it was a valuable exercise and helped me learn more about what VisionPoint is doing to leverage that value proposition. We must bring that value more to the forefront of how we invest our time and use this to help choose our clients.”
Understand Our Clients More Deeply
Part of this is setting up client "listening posts" at every customer interaction point so that the entire team hears what challenges our clients face. This helps us figure out how to take out the pains and hassles inherent in our business when they work with us.
Measure, Measure, Measure....
We must look to see a business dashboard on key metrics that align with our value proposition. The entire team will see that dashboard and will all be compensated in how we perform.
Kuehn adds that this executive training at Dartmouth has helped her see all that VisionPoint is doing right: “We are right in celebrating our company’s achievements with the entire team. We do post mortems on things that do not go to plan and learn from these. We also assign client teams to get cross functional perspectives on projects.”
She learned a lot about herself too. In one team exercise, Kuehn was the only person (out of 45 students) opting not to lend the case study company the $500,000 it needed to launch. “I had no idea that I was such a conservative banker!”
With classes over, Kuehn says she is delighted with the experience. “What I learned is extremely valuable. It was a huge honor being there and I’ve made connections with my classmates that I hope will last a lifetime.”