Interlude - Index of

Customers | 131
to what you know breaks Bad Hair Day
down. If you keep grow- I was once on a sales call in New
ing long enough, you will York, talking about NetApp’s com-
eventually start selling to mitment to product quality. I told
customers who are less like a story about how I tried to moti-
yourself. This is when you vate the engineering department
need to hire people with the
by promising to dye my hair any
customer-centric thinking
skills described in Chap-
crazy color they wanted if they
could reduce our failure rate by
a factor of ten.
ter Five. At a start-up serv- The magenta, blue, and red
ing customers like your- had long since grown out, so the
self, you unconsciously do customer looked me over and
the right thing; to mature
that start-up into a large
said, “And they chose gray?”
company serving other large companies, you must learn to
consciously study and understand their special needs.
As VP of engineering, I started a program called “Love
Yahoo/Love Cisco.” I appointed a full-time chief love officer
(CLO), with the job of doing whatever it took to make Yahoo
and Cisco happy. The motto was Customize then Standardize.
If he had to customize our products to meet their needs, then
so be it, but I also wanted him to put those changes back into
our standard products so that the rest of our customers would
eventually get the benefit too. Many salespeople asked me to
add their customers to the Love Program, but I always refused.
My main goal wasn’t to make Yahoo and Cisco happy—
although that was a nice side effect—but to learn from them.
Yahoo was one of our largest and most demanding Internet
customers; if we could make Yahoo happy, we could make any
Internet company happy. Likewise, for Cisco and other tech
companies.