Understand customer needs instead of guessing them

Why is customer focus so hard?

Because it requires a shift in perspective that daily business doesn't reward. From your company's internal view to a consistent focus on what customers want to get done. Easy to say. Rarely on a leader's calendar.

The shift affects every part of the business, not just sales. Development, production and service make decisions every day that customers feel, and they make most of them from the inside out. So customer focus is less about talking more about customers and more about getting more people in the company in contact with them.

The shift is hardest for companies that feel little competition. As long as availability and consistent quality are argument enough, customers stay even when they're treated badly. That position crumbles as soon as external shocks put supply chains, prices and willingness to pay in motion.

The test is simple: ask your leadership team when someone last visited a customer and watched them use your product. In most companies, that's where the room goes quiet.

Which three myths stand in the way?

They all sound reasonable, and they all lead to the same place: nobody asks anymore.

• "Needs change far too fast." They do change, just slower than claimed. It takes time before people really change their behavior. In the middle of the boom in vegetarian products, the classic currywurst keeps selling by the millions.
• "Customers don't know their needs." What's usually meant is: we know better. The iPhone gets cited as proof. That device also served a need that was already known, one Sony's Walkman had addressed decades earlier.
• "Customers can't articulate their needs." Often not directly. But the purchase decision itself reveals the preference, and behavior can be observed even where words are missing.

A fourth statement belongs to the same family, even if it's rarely said out loud: "Our customers will tell us if something's wrong." They won't. They complain about small things and leave over the big ones without mentioning them.

The third myth holds the most useful kernel. Don't just ask what customers want. Watch what they do.

How do you gather customer needs?

It depends on your data, budget and time. The experience is unspectacular: the more insight you get into your customers' world of expectations, the better you understand them. Three methods are almost always worth starting with.

For at least one of these methods, leave your desk. Half a day at a customer's site, with someone from management watching how your product is actually used, regularly delivers more than an analysis of two hundred survey responses.

For mid-sized companies, the first three rows are usually the right place to start. But a persona that nobody has checked against real data is just a guess with a face on it.

Which three dimensions should you clarify for each customer group?

Describe them briefly and in your own words. If you can't describe a point in two sentences, you don't know it yet.

• Job. What job is the customer trying to get done at work or in daily life? This means the purpose behind it, not the product itself.
• Obstacle. What risks, poor outcomes and hurdles come with that job? This is exactly where your opportunity lies.
• Benefit. What concrete benefit is the customer looking for? Time saved, certainty, lower costs, less coordination.

An example of how this plays out in B2B: A supplier believes its customer is buying precision. In conversations, it turns out the customer mainly needs on-time delivery, because a late shipment shuts down its own assembly line. Precision is taken for granted. What gets paid for is reliability.

The test for each of the three answers: would your customer recognize this sentence? If you could read it out loud and they nod, you've got it. If they hesitate, you're describing your offering, not their job.

Shifts like this are the real payoff of this module. They change what you talk about in sales, and often what you develop.

How do you segment in a way that makes sense?

The guiding questions are: can your customers be meaningfully divided into groups at all? Which groups do you serve? And which ones do you explicitly not serve?

Segment by behavior and need, not by revenue size. Sorting customers into A, B and C tells you who buys a lot. It tells you nothing about who buys for the same reasons, and only that can be served with a strategy.

The third question is the most important and the least popular. Segmentation without exclusion is just sorting. Only once you name a group you don't serve do real decisions about product, price and channel emerge.

A segment is described well enough when you can give the same answer on all three dimensions for every customer in it. As soon as two different jobs and two different obstacles show up within one group, you have two segments.

Check the hierarchy of needs for each group: what matters most to your target customers, and how well do you and your competitors serve that today? The second half of the question is routinely skipped, yet it's what creates a benchmark in the first place.

What's the output of this module?

A handful of sentences, not a report. Put the key insights into short, plain language as preparation for your first strategy workshop. Together they should add up to a story you can tell later.

Write them in your customers' language, not your company's. A sentence that contains your internal labels hasn't been translated yet, and in the workshop everyone will end up debating something different.

Here's what usable sentences look like: "Customers increasingly expect customization." "The days of the full product range are over." "What customers demand in terms of environmental documentation keeps rising, while their price pressure increases at the same time." "Our B2B customers are extending their value chain and taking over what used to be our core business."

Every one of these sentences can be verified, every one has consequences, and none needs an explanation. That's the standard. Anything that sounds more like a section heading isn't finished yet.