Philip Soriano

They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value

RELX is a 200-year-old London-based company formerly known as Reed Elsevier.

CEO—Engstrom, who was a McKinsey consultant and an executive at two publishing houses before assuming leadership of RELX, did that by coaching every RELX employee to obsess over “customer value”—the benefit the customer realizes from using a product. He has been repeating the same questions for 20 years: How does the customer measure value? How do we know? How do we measure that? How does using this product improve the customer’s economics? How do we know how much better off the customer is with our product—and how do we know that it is better on that metric than the alternatives are?

All too often when companies talk about customer metrics, they look at numbers such as customer acquisition cost, customer retention, lifetime value, and average transaction size—metrics that reflect how a customer benefits the company. In contrast, the how-obsessed CEOs we’ve studied focus on metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer.

Focusing deeply on how the company creates and delivers value for its customers was a cornerstone of the practices of the leaders we studied. According to our interviews, people in the organization don’t experience this specific kind of detail orientation as micromanaging. Rather, it creates mission clarity. When leaders show how much they personally care about what matters most to customers, attending to details becomes a shared norm for every employee—which expands the decision rights of those close to the front lines.

Van Gogh: “If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.”