In purchasing our types of products or services, what is most important to you? What do you expect from the product or service and from the supplier? What would exceed your expectations? In The Marketing Imagination, Harvard’s Theodore Levitt makes this cogent point: “Customers attach value to products in proportion to the perceived ability of those products to help solve their problems. Hence a product has meaning only from the viewpoint of the buyer or the ultimate user. All else is derivative. Only the buyer or user can assign value, because value can reside only in the benefits he wants or perceives.”¹⁵ So another important early middle game activity is to test your product, service, and behavioral differentiators with customers and determine what value they place on them. It’s easy to deceive yourself about your differentiators—to assume that some things differentiate you when in fact they don’t, to place more value on them than your customers do, or to undervalue something customers consider important. Clearly, it’s important to get this right, so the best practice is to ask customers what’s important to them and to test what you perceive as your differentiators. You might do it by asking these kinds of questions:
In purchasing our types of products or services, what is most important to you? What do you expect from the product or service and from the supplier? What would exceed your expectations?
What do you like about our products or services? What annoys you about them? What would make them a better fit for your needs? What do you wish we would change?
What do you like about doing business with us? What annoys you about doing business with us? What could we do to make the business relationship better?
What do we do for you that our competitors don’t? What do they do for you that we don’t? How important are these differences to you?
In your view, what differentiates us from our competitors? How important are those differences? What business value would you place on them?
What could we do differently that you would value more?
If you were to rate us as a supplier or partner, on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, what score would you give us? If we’re not a 10, what could we do to reach 10?
Most companies measure and monitor the significant factors affecting their businesses: sales and profits, customer growth and defection, support costs by product line, inventory turns, profit margins, and so forth. On your website you’re probably measuring hits and clicks, traffic, page views, and unique visitor sessions. You’re probably also monitoring click-throughs, conversion rates, navigation paths, and abandoned shopping carts. But none of these metrics matter to your customers. They can’t help you improve your customer’s experience in doing business with you.—Patricia B. Seybold, The Customer Revolution
Even asking these questions is bound to differentiate you behaviorally because few companies are diligent about testing their differentiators and asking customers to value them and their products. We suspect that some people are reluctant to ask the questions as directly as we are suggesting because the news may not be good or because customers may want more than you can reasonably and affordably provide. But in our opinion any answers to these questions are valuable. If you’re not as highly thought of as you’d like, it’s best to know that now so you can fix it, and if customers want more than you can affordably provide, then you at least have engaged them in a dialogue that can lead to a better understanding between you. Finally, if the customer does not perceive that you are differentiated from your competitors or doesn’t value your differentiators, then you at least know where you stand and know that you have work to do. Being unaware that you’re undifferentiated, however, means that you’ll be beaten down relentlessly on price and won’t understand why business is getting so tough. Smart companies test their differentiators with customers and learn how customers value those differentiators. Then they build product, service, and behavioral differentiation from an informed position and are well positioned for mid–middle game when business opportunities arise.