Love your customer (but lust your prospect)

“If I asked my customers what they wanted they would say ‘faster horses’” Henry Ford.

This just in! Your customers don’t always give you the best product direction.

In Pragmatic Marketing, Inc.’s e-book “The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders” www.pragmaticmarketing.com they show a classic quadrant with Unit Sales up the Y-axis and Customer Satisfaction along the X-axis. The magic upper-right quadrant is “Market Driven” on the “Path to Profitability”. The point they're making is customer satisfaction is very important to success. There are tons of studies that discuss how much lower the cost of sales are to an existing happy customer as opposed to dynamiting out a brand new one. You want your customers to be happy and satisfied. More, you want them to be repeat buyers who are great references who sign off on their maintenance invoice without hesitation.

But, be careful letting your existing customers drive your product direction and release schedule. Unless they have a clause in their agreement of features you must produce (and shame on you for falling into that trap) you need to make sure you provide great customer support and a willing ear to their ideas – after all, they’ll be using your product more than you do.

Being market-driven means just that. You must talk to, listen to, and understand the whole market. It absolutely includes your customers as well as your prospects and the ones that got away and bought a competitive product (or did nothing).

A good “business barometer” of a healthy growth company that I learned during my formative years at ADP measures both growth in maintenance revenue (happy customers) and growth in new sales (a strong product line). In any established company this should be the goal.