Make the service understandable before asking the customer to commit

In October 2022 I authorised a sixteen-week education programme with JPY36 million of marketing resources. The starting material led with a single annual saving illustration. Its assumptions had been reviewed internally, but the presentation made the yearly figure more memorable than the customer's own pattern of electricity use. I wanted a prospective buyer to understand why the timing of generation and consumption deserved discussion before applying an example to their premises.

The creative team favoured the prominent percentage because it gave the campaign a clear opening. Technical colleagues were more concerned about what a reader might infer once the accompanying explanation was shortened. I asked for three explicitly hypothetical daily-use patterns instead. They illustrated different operating calendars without pretending to be assessments of actual customer sites. Engineering reviewed the technical basis, while commercial colleagues checked how the explanation related to the proposition being discussed.

Twenty-four selected finance and facilities participants worked through the revised material. Seventeen could explain afterwards why electricity generated and electricity used on site were different quantities. Seven needed a further explanation. These were observations from a small learning exercise, not evidence about all potential customers or an estimate of financial benefit. We used the questions to improve the material and retained a route into site-specific assessment rather than turn the exercise into a sales-performance claim.

I accepted a less immediate promotional opening. The programme produced a set of illustrations that asked the customer to consider their working week, with the relevant assumptions beside the example. It also exposed the limits of our explanation before a wider release. If I repeated the work, I would bring people with different operational calendars into the first creative discussion, rather than wait until a polished annual illustration had become the team's preferred answer. The decision taught me that factual review and customer interpretation are different kinds of work. A reviewed number can still occupy so much attention that the conditions needed to understand it disappear from the conversation.

The May 2023 partner programme began with a familiar request: help regional intermediaries produce more expressions of interest in commercial solar. I had JPY54 million and fourteen weeks to organise the marketing support for twelve partners. Counting signed expressions would have made the programme easy to report. It would have told us much less about whether the next customer conversation was being prepared well.

I proposed that the support programme recognise verified participation in a learning review. Partners had to work through the customer questions behind an example, explain when specialist assessment was needed and identify the limits of what the initial discussion established. Some colleagues considered this too indirect. They wanted the available support to produce a larger campaign total within the quarter. I understood the attraction, but a programme can teach people what matters through the measure attached to it, even when every individual presentation is approved.

Nine partners completed the learning review. Two deferred participation and one withdrew. We spent JPY41 million, leaving JPY13 million of the authorised amount unspent. The commercial team's partner agreements and approved terms remained unchanged; my decision concerned the basis and administration of this marketing-support programme. A completed learning review was recorded as such, without being converted into a forecast of installations or a claim about sales attributable to the programme.

The consequence was a smaller immediate activity account and a more demanding discussion with intermediaries about the work we expected them to do. The team could explain why support had been provided and what had actually been examined. I would involve partner managers earlier in designing the review if starting again, particularly to understand the reasons a regional business might defer. The useful outcome was not a declaration that all partners now explained the service perfectly. It was a change in the behaviour our own support programme encouraged. Marketing could no longer ask for careful discussion while rewarding only the speed with which an expression of interest arrived.

In September 2024 I commissioned a twelve-week review of customer handover material, with JPY28 million authority. The welcome sequence described the brand and service proposition coherently. It was less consistent about a practical matter: which person on the customer's side would receive a system alert and understand the next agreed step. A polished introduction could leave that responsibility unclear.

We used eighteen selected handover walkthroughs to examine the sequence. Eleven needed clearer identification of the recipient; seven already made the arrangement clear. The walkthroughs were a way to inspect these particular explanations, not an estimate of the prevalence of the issue across every customer. Emi Narusawa's colleagues supplied the actual technical and service responsibilities. Marketing had neither the authority nor the technical knowledge required to invent an alert procedure or change a maintenance commitment.

The brand team initially wanted the existing introduction to remain first, followed by a separate service appendix. Service colleagues argued that the recipient and next action were the customer's immediate concerns. I agreed to reorganise the welcome material around those concerns. The brand account moved later in the sequence. We asked the relevant teams to review the revised explanation against the actual arrangement before it was used, so that a clearer page did not become a substitute for an agreed responsibility.

The result was revised orientation material for the reviewed situations. We did not change system output, the alert mechanism or the maintenance service through this programme. I would bring the customer-side recipient into the design review earlier on a future project; a document addressed only to the buyer can overlook the colleague who will use it. The experience reinforced a principle from my service career. Adoption includes the ability to locate the next responsible person. Marketing contributes by making that route understandable, while accepting that the service team may need to lead the opening conversation. Preserving visual continuity was less valuable than helping the customer recognise what would happen next.

A June 2025 awareness campaign was planned over twenty weeks with JPY62 million authority. The examples were intended to help businesses consider commercial-rooftop solar. During review, the operating patterns behind the illustrations drew too heavily on working weeks without weekend closure. That omission mattered because an annual generation account does not, by itself, explain how a particular business uses electricity through the week.

The campaign window was commercially attractive. Kenji Sorihama challenged whether we needed to delay the whole release when qualifications could be added to the existing material. My team also faced the loss of a media reservation. I asked engineering and finance colleagues to examine the assumptions behind the examples, then proposed a six-week delay to change the account itself. A qualification at the end would not necessarily correct the impression created by the sequence in which the illustrations were presented.

Fourteen examples were reviewed. Nine were revised and five withdrawn. JPY8 million in media-reservation cost could not be recovered; that amount sat within the JPY62 million programme authority, rather than being added to it as a separate budget. The revised material included the relevant operating-calendar questions and a clearer route to specialist discussion. It did not imply that two businesses with the same annual generation figure would obtain the same financial value.

I accepted both the delayed release and the unrecoverable expense. The supported result was the changed campaign and the cost of the decision, not an attributed improvement in installations or customer bills. With hindsight, the operating calendar should have been part of the creative brief before the media reservation was made. That is the practice I would change first if facing the same programme again. The case remains uncomfortable because the later review found a problem that earlier collaboration could have exposed. Leadership in that situation meant making the correction visible, including its cost, rather than presenting a late qualification as evidence that the original sequence had been sufficient.

In April 2026 I began a nine-month educational programme with JPY45 million authority. Existing customers were raising questions about the later life of their service and possible replacement decisions. The commercial temptation was to interpret those questions as the opening of a renewal campaign. I wanted first to understand what people needed to know and which questions belonged with technical or commercial colleagues.

Forty people were invited to a programme of three workshops. Twenty-six accepted and fourteen declined. By October, two workshops had taken place. Nineteen unique people had attended at least one of those sessions; seven people who accepted had not yet attended. The attendance record distinguished people from visits, so someone attending both sessions did not become two customers in the report. We also kept a declined invitation separate from any assumption about satisfaction with the service.

Colleagues asked whether participants could be placed immediately into a commercial follow-up sequence. I chose to let the question determine the next discussion. Some matters needed an engineering explanation; others concerned terms or a decision that the customer had not yet considered. Participation in an educational session was not, by itself, an expression of intent to extend or replace anything. The team therefore retained the substance of the question and the appropriate route for responding, instead of converting the attendance list into a renewal forecast.

The programme remains unfinished, with the third workshop still ahead. We have not established a renewal result or a change in customer retention. I would make the distinction between education and a commercial invitation clearer in the initial internal brief next time, so that the team does not have to resolve it after people have accepted. The work is useful because it lets an unresolved customer question remain unresolved long enough to receive the right answer. An existing relationship should make that conversation easier to begin; it should not give marketing permission to decide in advance what the customer's curiosity means.