Diamonds in Your Backyard

Turning your company into a customer-driven growth machine



Your competitor’s goals are real easy to understand … they want to kill you.

“If my competition was drowning, I’d shove a fire hose down their throat,” This is what Ray Crock was quoted as saying in his book The Golden Arches. Please have no illusions that some of your competitors regard you with contempt.

Taking this logic a step further, if we’re not the ones using the fire hose, we’re the ones having the fire hose used against us. This ‘fire hose’ is our competitor’s game plan.

Being in business is a real rollercoaster ride and it can change minute by minute. At 9am, you’re on top of the world zooming along at 100 miles an hour doing loops and winning, but by 10.15am when you hear that the competition has just launched a new product or taken on a new strategy that will adversely affect your sales, you’re losing, and there’s a long, steep, slow, tough ride back up to the top. It’s got to be done but no one enjoys it.

To help us stay at the top and avoid being blindsided, we need to find out what are our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Only by doing this can we avoid attacking where they are strong and take full advantage of their weaknesses.

But how do we find what our competition’s strengths and weaknesses are?

In the economic climate we are experiencing right now, money is tight. Giving money to someone else to research your competition can be one of the first expenses to be eliminated.

Now, I’m not for one minute suggesting that you spend a whole heap of time and energy worrying about your competition and finding out what they are doing. You do, however, need to have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing that works and what doesn’t. After all, if you can learn from their mistakes, you’re not the one paying for it.

One of the first things most people do is start going to industry functions. You know how it is, going to these industry functions: getting on well with all your competitors, exchanging smiles and niceties and promising to catch up one day, knowing it will never happen or if it does, it will be a game of cat and mouse. Sometimes you’ll be the cat and sometimes you’ll be the mouse. Both of you trying to find out what the others game plan is; never really knowing if you’re getting the full or even the true story.

Larger companies spend absolute truck loads on market research. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of phone calls go out every night – right around dinner time or when you’re in the middle of putting the kids to bed – all in the name of ‘market research’. Questionnaires are carefully crafted with 5000 questions to ensure they get the truth out of the one percent of people that agree to them only taking a short ’10 minutes’ of their evening. All the answers are analysed and it is eventually decided that either yes it is a good idea to go ahead and change the logo or no it isn’t … or even maybe? It’s hard to say really, it was a 50/50 split.

Luckily, there is an easier and more cost effective way to get the information you need about your competitor’s game plan and the direction in which you should be steering your company.

You have diamonds in your own backyard; you just need to dig them up.

Many years ago in South Africa, there was a young man who inherited the family’s huge 10,000-acre farm. After growing up seeing his father working every hour God gave him, he decided that farming wasn’t for him and he’d never make his fortune on the land. He sold the farm and promptly went out in search of his riches. He spent years looking and, as it does, his money ran out. Eventually, in a fit of despair, he threw himself off a bridge and ended his life – broke, alone and depressed.

During this period, the person who bought the farm had been coming across some interesting looking rocks in the riverbeds. One of these rocks was larger than the others. He liked the look of it so he picked it out of the creek bed, cleaned it up and put it on his mantle. A few years went by and, one day, an amateur geologist friend of his was over for dinner. He noticed the rock on the mantle and asked the farmer where he’d gotten it from. “Oh I just picked it out of one of the creeks,” replied the farmer. Quite sarcastically, his geologist friend asked if he knew what type of rock it was, “No idea. The creeks are full of them,” replied the farmer.

The rock was one of the largest diamonds ever found out in the open and the ‘farm’ ended up being one of the largest diamond mines in South Africa. If only the original owner had looked in his own back yard, he would have found his fortune instead of ending his life in despair.

It is the same with all of us. Our customers are our 10,000-acre farm. If we go out there and dig a little, they will provide us with all the diamonds we could ever want. If we want diamonds or information about our competitors, all we need to do is ask a friendly customer.

Put your own questionnaire together. If you are in retail, have a pad at the counter. If you are in B2B, send it out with your statements or even separately to the person in charge of using whatever you supply.

We need to keep it simple so it is quick and easy for our customers to fill out. Put yourself in their shoes. They’ll be happy to help with a bit of market research but don’t make it 57 questions long.

Limit yourself to finding out the answers to these three questions:

1. What do they like about the products and services they currently use from you?

2. If they were you, what would they do to improve what you do?

3. Who else do you use for similar or related products and services that you supply and what do you get from them?

In any conversation you or your staff have with your customers, you need to find out the answers to the following three questions. You don’t necessarily have to ask your customer these exact questions, however, during the course of the conversation, you MUST always find out the answers to them.

1. What do they use now?

2. What do they like about it?

3. What would they improve about what you do?

These are the very fundamentals of turning your company into a customer-driven growth machine.

Good luck, get out there and go for it with your market research.

Vaughan Tombs
www.vtsalestraining.com