- Customers don’t care if your product has more features than your competitors.
- Customers don’t care if your CEO or your competitor’s CEO has the better office or Headquarters.
- Customers don’t care who has the most employees or the most awards.
- The price of your stock compared to your competitors doesn’t make your product or service more valuable.
- Customers don’t care who has the coolest booth at the trade show.
Replace these 5 competitive things with 5 things the customers do care about:
- Are you trustworthy?
- Do you think about your customer’s success first?
- Do you focus on the value you deliver vs. the price you receive?
- Does your business have a higher purpose than just making money from your customer relationships?
- Do you bring your customers thought leadership that is continuously improved?
The days of companies strategizing to beat competitors to own the customers are over. When did you hear of a customer who is trying to improve their business that cares about their vendor one upping another vendor. How often do you hear about customers who care about anything other than the value they receive and the degree to which they trust who they do business with?
If we listen, we hear customers asking for long-term relationships with partners who are committed to the customer’s success by bringing innovation and disciplined business practices.
To make it all worse the time, the energy, the focus and the money spent on the competition is telling the customer how unimportant they are.
As fast as the customers, the technology and the market are moving, any time spent on competition increases the distance to the customer partnership.
Destroy the myth that companies compete to own the customer and embrace the reality of value based customer’s partnerships.