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Are Your Customers Partners, Allies Or Pigeons?: By now, you’ve read a lot of directives from me to think about how you do business. Indeed, how you think creates some options and eliminates others. How do you think about your customers? There are firms who act as if they think (although they would never explicitly express it this way) of their customers as ATM accounts, and the job of the sales rep is to withdraw as much as possible. Other companies have treated customers as pigeons:
There’s nothing wrong with making money. There is nothing wrong with raising margins. There is nothing shameful about touting the virtues of your products. However, you should also think about how you can gain advantages by creating partnerships and alliances with the people with whom you do business. Imagine for a moment that you make "stromblers." (They’re fictional.) You can sell the stromblers you make to your customers. Your competition is also trying to sell stromblers to the same people. You and your competitors are experts on engineering and manufacturing stromblers. You have an infrastructure in place that lets you make stromblers as efficiently as possible. The more extensive your infrastructure, the more you have to make stromblers in a particular way, the more rigid is your idea about how stromblers can be engineered, manufactured and deployed. When changes came slowly this was less of a big deal than it is today. With changes happening so rapidly now, however, this sort of rigidity is not in your best interests. Becoming partners with your customers, rather than seeing them as pigeons, changes how you think about things. You would work to understand their business idea and the ideas of their competition. You’d become privy to your customers’ conversations with their customers. You’d understand their pressures and threats. You would be in a position to collaborate (to “co – labor”) with them, to adapt your stromblers to the realities of their marketplaces. You would be situated to anticipate their needs and develop applications that helped them recognize and adapt to future developments that any one particular customer might not yet be anticipating. The more intimate you are with your customers, the harder it is for a competitor to displace you. If you are providing a value that is beyond the advantages of your standard product, it is harder for a competitor to displace you by undercutting your price or coming up with a single product enhancement. In effect, you are blending your business idea with the business ideas of your customers. This is shared vision; impact and intimacy create powerful connections that go far beyond your two firms simply using each other. It also creates a synergy that keeps your relationship with your customer vital. The more interconnected you are with each other’s success, the more difficult it becomes for a competitor to move in and displace you. Now, that’s security. Treating customers as allies and partners also provides you with additional sources of marketplace intelligence, while making you a more valuable ally in return. You increase the feedback you’re likely to get, because you’ve added a second pair of eyes, by recruiting others who are watching developments in your marketplace on your behalf. You become more valuable by returning the favor. You also have the ability to talk strategies with partners, who may have helpful information, and to do the same for them. Okay, so you don’t make stromblers. You have a Quick Print shop, a neighborhood deli or a vending business. The issue isn’t whether you can partner with your customers. The issue is that you do it. This is especially true if your customers have seen you as a commodity supplier. How did Kinko’s do it, or Starbucks? They added value by understanding what their customers needed or craved, and found a way to deliver it to them in easy, yet profitable ways. Rackham’s book, referenced above, is full of stories of how many suppliers became partners with their consumers, merging processes and services to create value that couldn’t be achieved in other ways. (See a continuing discussion in section 8.
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