What You Can Learn From Your Customers

While you have been playing by the rules that made your company successful, your competition has rewritten the rule book.

While you have been resting on your laurels, your competition has been moving forward.

While you have been explaining or defending your company's actions to your customers, your competition has been asking them "How do we improve?"

"How quickly we forget how swiftly the competitive landscape can change."

I was reminded of this recently. We had been viewing a key customer through the prism of what had made us successful in the past, failing to recognize that our competition had been deliberately and methodically chipping away at our position. While we played by the old set of rules, a new rule book had been written.

The silver lining is that this has served as a wake up call, an opportunity to reflect and challenge some long held beliefs. I am reminded of the book "Who Moved My Cheese?". We had forgotten to smell the cheese to see if it had gotten stale.

The good news is that your top customers are a tremendous source of information about changes in the competive landscape. They know you, they know your competition, and they can provide a snapshot of how you, your team, and your company stack up. By engaging your top customers as a litmus test of your company's performance, in addition to a source of revenue, you will gain an ongoing understanding of issues that will eventually affect your revenue.

There are six performance areas to consider probing with your top customers. These also happen to align closely with the broader strategic pillars your company may be using:

1. Quality - how does your product and service quality compare to others that they purchase?
2. Innovation - how innovative have you been in developing and bringing forth new product or service improvements? What issues does your customer have that you may be able to solve... and that could be offered to others?
3. Responsiveness - how well are your responding to the needs of this customer compared to the other companies they use?
4. Ease of Doing Business - you may think that your company is easy to work with, what does your customer say when compared to your competition? If they had a choice, who would they prefer and why?
5. After Sales Support - how are you doing versus your competition in supporting your customer after the purchase with service, warranty, parts, training, or whatever else is important to them? Is this an opportunity to create separation from the competition?
6. Understanding Your Customer - Does your customer perceive that you understand what is important to them, where they are going and how you can help them get there? How do you compare to their other suppliers?

These are simple questions that we can quickly forget to ask. And then quickly find that our competitive landscape has changed.