AFTER $14 MILLION dollars and four years

AFTER $14 MILLION dollars and four years, our customers don't want to buy what we have? What a depressing statement from a VP of Sales. How many times can you afford to have a new product fail in the Nike Blazer High marketplace? How many customers can you afford to lose because you don't meet their needs?

Shortest time to market no longer cuts it, nor does lowest cost. And excellent customer service is now expected. As the old rules for achieving competitive advantage fade away, what can you do to secure customers and vanquish competitors?

The only true, sustainable competitive advantage is an intimate understanding of customer needs. You can develop such "clear customer insight" in many ways and use it to win profits and the loyalty of "savvy" customers.

Learn About Your Customers

Often, we attempt to understand our customers by employing approximations of customer needs and wants, such as third-party market research, anecdotal evidence from sales or service organizations, competitive activities, website tracking, and, worse, our own opinions. We need to go directly to the source, gathering real, direct customer insight that's accurate, current, and meaningful, and upon which we can bet our businesses.

Not every customer has something to offer. The 80/20 rule applies here: select the most valuable 20 percent of your customers according to an accepted metric such as strategic fit, gross revenue, gross margin, Nike Blazer Shoes,cost to support, or frequency of purchase, and cultivate long-term, two-way relationships with them. Ask them to share with you their candid opinions. Go visit them and observe the use of your product or service in actual environments.