Customer check-in time

Here’s a thought for a new month-

In this economy everyone is looking for new business opportunities to grow their revenue stream, but that should be balanced with also taking care of your current customer base- remember your existing customers represent that attractive new revenue that your competitors are chasing.

When was the last time you took the time to really find out if your current customers are satisfied with your products and services- what about quality, delivery, ordering process, technical support, documentation etc, etc? The very act of engaging with your customers and asking for their opinion shows that you value their business and the relationship you have with them. Any improvements that you make as a result of customer feedback will payback many times over; armed with the insights from your current customers about what makes them a satisfied customer will help you win new business from your competitors.

So, declare April to be “customer check-in month”.

Competitive Assessment 101- aka "how long is a piece of string"

I was asked a simple question the other day by a colleague just starting up a new business- he wanted to know how much time and effort he should expect to put into completing a market assessment. Simple question, right? My initial thought was to say something smart like “how long is a piece of string”, or “how long have you got”, but he was being serious. Anyway we talked for about an hour or so and I thought I would try to capture the main points we discussed.

A market assessment typically covers the following:
-Target market size (broken down to sub-segments to be targeted)
-Segmentation analysis, including any additional segments served by your competitors
-Key industry groups and associations
-Decision makers (by job function)
-Supply chain and distribution channels
-Competitive analysis
-Pricing trends and market forecasts

The good news I told him was that these steps did not have to be completed sequentially, however aspects of many of these streams of work are inter-related, so it is likely that he would cycle through each step more than once as more and more information is gathered.

After talking for a while we decided the piece of string was much shorter than initially thought since he already had spent a great deal of time scoping and sizing the market opportunity. However his biggest gap was really the competitive analysis piece of the puzzle. We sketched out the follow outline:

Key issues to examine:
- Identify major competitors in each sub-segment
- Identify major potential customers, and promising startups

- Determine who is involved in the customer’s decision making process
- Understand the buying process- purchase frequency and cycles

- Uncover key product/service performance attributes
- Uncover customers’ selection criteria (decision making model)

- Gather ratings against those attributes and criteria for you and your competitors
- Understand barriers to switching

After we had this all down on paper my friend asked another simple question- “how long will it take you to find out all this information for me”? I thought about that piece of string again, but instead we set a date for another meeting to scope out the work and develop a detailed time-line.