“Which of these services do customers want us to add?”

This product supplier competed shoulder to shoulder with a large number of direct competitors. The president and marketing manager thought adding services would differentiate the company. They thought of five services they could add, but wanted to start with one or two that appealed most to customers.

Which services did customers clamor for? None of them! This company didn’t understand how their customers made the vendor-selection decision. Customers liked this company’s integrity and people, but all of the competing companies were leaving mountains of money on the table ignoring where the real growth in demand was! What they wanted from somebody in this industry was a wider array of products.

Being the only competitor who bothered asking customers what they really wanted gave this vendor a huge advantage. They retooled their offering to match their customers’ full spectrum of needs. They completely reinvented themselves to take advantage of under-the-radar demand.

They stopped positioning themselves as an industry also-ran, created and marketed their differentiators, and sales took off!