Trust Busters

What customers buy never appears on the invoice. This hard truth reveals the sharp divide between the energies expended by most organizations and the value perceptions of the people who determine their fate. It also reveals the reasons why so many marketing, advertising and sales initiatives fail to generate returns.

When I discuss this issue with company leaders, most are quick to recognize that the customer can buy essentially the same physical product, or professional service, from many sources. They accept quickly that it’s nearly impossible to be the low-price resource for every product. Clearly, they’ll agree, the product and its price are commodities in terms of customer value.

I’m dismayed, however, by the number of times my colleagues will follow their agreement with a one-word assertion about what their specific customers are buying. “It’s service,” says one. “It’s trust,” says another. “It’s the people,” says a third. And so it goes, as each tosses out a value that might be an undifferentiated commodity for their specific company and customer base.

It’s not that trust is unimportant, but it might be the case that customers in a particular industry trust many vendors in the same way and for the same reasons. In that environment, being trustworthy provides no competitive advantage. Ditto for service or people or any other value. If everyone offers it, there’s no edge.

Worse, the company leader might define trust or service differently from the descriptions offered by customers. Does the company leader believe customers trust him personally, trust the contents of the product, trust the service department, trust everything…? Do customers trust the people they work with directly, but not the management team? Do they trust the initial quality of the goods they purchase, but not the service people they call when a doohickey ungadgets?

All of us have filters that we apply instinctively when we confront the hundreds of decision points we pass in a day. When we apply instinct, however, we aren’t thinking about the issue de novo and we aren’t questioning the wisdom of our actions. Instead, we are simply filtering our options according to the things we have seen, and concluded, previously.

NBD, most of the time. When we substitute our own filters for those of the customer, however, we put our companies at risk. So many times, the “hard decision” to close a business unit results, at least in part, from the “too-easy” decision to apply corporate filters to customer perceptions. How do we test this hypothesis? Simply listen the next time a business executive talks about products and services. Does he say, “Our customers need…” or does he say, “We asked our customers and they told us they value…?”

The difference is huge. We can work to deliver what we believe the market needs, or we can focus on what the customer really buys.

But don’t trust me on this. Check it out for yourself.