What If You Knew What Your Customers Wanted?

"Most people don't know what they want, but they're pretty sure they haven't got it."
-Alfred E Newman

There's definitely more truth to that statement than MADness. I can remember quite a number of years ago when I expressed the deep frustration I was feeling in my life at that time to my personal coach. She then requested that I describe to her a typical day of what I wanted my life to be. This hardly seemed like a difficult task.

I wanted to get up early, go work out, come back home to have breakfast with the family, but I didn't want to be left with the dishes, once everyone headed out the door. My coach said, "Tammy, remember, you're supposed to be telling me what you want, not what you don't want." Grateful for the reminder I continued. But it wasn't long at all before I was back to describing what I didn't want to see happening in my sales business.

Each time I described what I didn't want, my coach reminded me to speak instead about what I wanted. By the time I finished describing my ideal day, I was acutely aware of how much I thought in terms of what I didn't want as opposed to what I wanted. Here's the rub ? most people think of me as a very upbeat and positive person; yet I struggled to describe an ideal day void of what I didn't want.

So what does all of this have to do with your customers? Plenty. Consider that your customers might feel frustrated, but if given the opportunity to describe the ideal day, they'd struggle to describe what they want. According to the economist Malcolm Gladwell, that's actually quite common - most people have difficulty describing what they want.

Gladwell says this is especially easy to observe by asking people what they want in a cup of coffee. The vast majority of people will say that they like a dark rich roast. But statistics show that only 25% of people like dark rich roast and that many prefer milky, weak coffee.

Gosh, remember the days when we had to meet at places like Village Inn and Denny's for a cup of coffee? And remember when meeting someone for a cup of coffee meant meeting someone for a cup of Folgers? I didn't know anything about espresso or cappuccino until I went to Europe in my early twenties. Now you can walk into any coffee shop and realize that you don't even know what these concoctions are that people are ordering. What caused this change?

According to Gladwell, we owe the abundance of choices in food to Howard Moskowitz, who discovered back in the 1970's that there isn't one perfect kind of coffee, mustard, or spaghetti sauce. There are instead various clusters of favorites.

You see, back in the early 1980's the Campbell Soup Company hired Moskowitz to help improve the sales of Prego spaghetti sauce. Moskowitz had already come to believe that there wasn't one perfect recipe for spaghetti sauce. After coming up with 45 varieties of sauce - some sweet, some spicy, some tangy, some chunky, etc. he tested thousands of people and three primary preference groups emerged. Those groups were plain, spicy and chunky.

Now seriously who wudda thunk that? Chunky? Yep. One third of Americans preferred chunky sauce although they had never even said that was what they liked. When the Campbell Soup Company put jars of chunky Prego spaghetti sauce on the shelves, they sold 600 Million dollars of it in the next 10 years.

The lesson you can learn from this is that you can't assume that all of your customers know what they want. What would you do differently today assuming that your customers don't even know what they want? What would you need to do to help them find out what they want, and what would happen if you did that?

Another lesson to take back to the office with you is that you can't afford to assume that you know what your customers want. Look at all the years food companies thought we wanted only thin spaghetti sauce, white vinegar, and yellow mustard. Talk a trip into any grocery store these days and you'll find something like 36 varieties of spaghetti sauce, the plus kinds of mustard and vinegar. Someone finally took the time to find out what the customers wanted.

I've met business people at networking meetings who get my card and put me on their list to receive weekly or monthly emails. The irritating thing for me is, they never asked me. If they had only asked, I probably would have said, "Sure." It rubs me the wrong way that they never asked me, the customer, what I wanted, and now I'm not keen at all on giving them my business.

Do you send out monthly correspondence to your customers? If so I applaud you. It's good to keep in front of them. Now, have you asked them if they read the correspondence you send? By taking some interest in your customers you just might start the process of helping them and you learn what it is they want.