21 Jul Listening to Customers
I joined a large consumer goods market research company as Vice President of Client Services (Sales), replacing a highly respected executive who had led the sales organization for more than twenty-five years. He was understandably surprised that he was being replaced, but that is a story for another day.
For more than fifty years, the company had been the undisputed leader in its industry. It enjoyed an enviable reputation, a loyal customer base, and dominant market share. But dominance can create complacency.
A fast-growing start-up entered the market with superior technology, faster delivery of customized research, and significantly lower prices. Customers quickly took notice. Before long, several major accounts—each generating millions of dollars in annual revenue—terminated their long-standing relationships with us and moved their business to the newcomer.
The warning signs were unmistakable.
The President of our U.S. operations conducted monthly management meetings attended by his direct reports and other senior leaders, often with more than twenty-five people in the room. The meetings typically began with a review of financial performance and operational metrics before each executive reported on developments within his or her organization. My responsibility was to present updates on new business opportunities, sales performance, competitive activity, and significant customer developments.
Believing that sales leaders should never rely solely on reports, I spent considerable time in the field accompanying our account managers on customer visits. I wanted to hear directly from prospects and customers rather than through multiple layers of interpretation.
A clear pattern quickly emerged.
Regardless of the industry or account size, customers consistently expressed the same frustrations. They wanted customized research delivered much faster. They wanted greater flexibility in how data was presented and analyzed. They wanted greater insights into the reasons for the changes that occurred in the marketplace so they could act on them. These were capabilities our products simply did not provide. Most importantly, they were telling us that our competitor was responding to those needs far more effectively than we were.
I repeatedly shared these observations during our management meetings.
Unfortunately, my message was largely dismissed by the “old guard.”
Several executives suggested that I was still too new to the company to fully understand the marketplace. Others believed our long history of success meant we already knew what customers wanted. Their attitude was essentially, “We’ve been serving this industry for decades. We understand our customers.”
From my perspective, the message from customers could not have been clearer.
The issue wasn’t whether customers were speaking.
The issue was whether management was listening.
After months of little progress, I decided to take a different approach.
Rather than continue repeating what customers were telling me, I invited the Market Research Director from one of our largest customers to attend part of our next management meeting and share his views directly with the executive team.
He immediately accepted the invitation and even flew to Chicago at his company’s own expense.
The outcome was exactly what I expected.
For nearly an hour, he calmly explained the very same concerns I had been communicating for months. He described the changing needs of the marketplace, why customers were evaluating alternative suppliers, and why speed, flexibility, and technology had become increasingly important.
The room became remarkably quiet.
No one challenged his observations.
No one questioned his credibility.
There was little discussion because the evidence was now coming directly from one of our largest customers rather than from the head of sales.
After the meeting, one senior executive approached me privately and said I should never have invited the customer because I had embarrassed the management team members who had questioned my conclusions.The company’s leaders rejected real-time feedback from a knowledgeable customer.
I viewed the situation very differently.
The meeting exposed a much deeper organizational problem.
The company wasn’t losing business because its employees lacked talent or commitment. It was losing business because its leadership had become convinced it already understood its customers. Years of market leadership had created overconfidence. As customer expectations evolved, management continued relying on yesterday’s assumptions instead of today’s realities.
There was another lesson as well.
Leadership placed surprisingly little value on the insights provided by its own account managers. Too often, they were viewed simply as salespeople trying to close business rather than as trusted advisors who spent more time with customers than anyone else in the organization.
No one in the company had more firsthand exposure to changing customer expectations than the sales organization.
Yet one of the organization’s richest sources of competitive intelligence was routinely overlooked.
Throughout my career in enterprise software, financial technology, data services, and information solutions, I have been fortunate to work with innovative customers whose ideas led directly to meaningful product improvements, new features, and entirely new offerings.
I cannot recall a single instance where listening carefully to prospects and customers resulted in building the wrong product.
Quite the opposite.
Many customers enthusiastically volunteered to become beta sites, testing new products before general availability and providing candid feedback that helped us eliminate weaknesses, improve usability, and deliver stronger solutions to the marketplace.
The experience reinforced a principle I have carried throughout my career.
Customers do far more than buy products.
They help companies build better products at little additional cost, provided the company is willing to change.
Organizations that genuinely listen to their customers gain an enormous competitive advantage. They anticipate change instead of reacting to it. They innovate faster, strengthen customer loyalty, and make better strategic decisions.
Organizations that assume they already have all the answers often discover—when market share begins to disappear—that their competitors were listening far more carefully.
The most valuable voice in any company is often the one that is easiest to ignore: the customer’s.