It’s  rather common and trite to discuss the importance of knowing your customers business.  I rarely meet a sales person who says they don’t know their customers business.  But how well do we really know our customers business?   How many of us have actually sat down with all of our customers and had a discussion about their business, no conversations about solutions, no discussion about products, just a straight forward, full press discussion about their business.   I’m talking about workflow discussions, customer profiles, culture, KPI’s (key performance indicators), competition, 5 year goals, product development, initiatives, capital, expenses, etc.

Having a conversation with your customer about their business is the holy grail.

We think we know about our customers business, we talk as if we do, but do we really?   Where did we get our information?  If we didn’t get it from the horses mouth, we may not know as much as we think we do.

Ask your customer (all the different stakeholders) to breakdown their business for you.  Ask them to school you on everything they can in how they run their business.   Once you’ve done that you can say you know.   Once you’ve done that ask yourself, is there anything I should be doing differently?   I bet there is.

Do you know your customers business?  Yes?  Why?  Because they told you so?