Distributors: Rate Your Manufacturer

Click here to answer this 18 Criteria survey: This Month: Lamp Manufacturers

Last 3 Month's Survey Results:

Does Your Company Listen to The Market?
Results Report

Over the last 3 months, we posted a survey that asked questions about this subject. 103 organizations responded, mostly distributors.

Distributors felt that their organizations listened to the market, driven mostly by the CEO, but often by the sales, marketing or sales & marketing VP.

Listening methods may not be that effective, though. Most cited "field interviews", followed by survey research and then by phone interviews. I have my doubts about how well organized and structured these interviews are, and how well the feedback is synthesized, analyzed and prioritized for action. If you're just fielding reports of complaints or new wishes as they come in, you're probably not very well organized to synthesize and summarize what the feedback says.

Benchmarking, Anyone?

Distributors that said they do listen to the customer well don't generally benchmark performance or perception of their performance vs competitors. So how do you know how you're really doing. You scored 5 runs. How many did the other team score? CMG's customer perception survey for distributors benchmarks vs competitors. It's the only one like it in the industry.

Manufacturers (only 29) said they benchmark vs competitors more often. I have a feeling that's on product features, however, less on service and franchise performance for the distributor. Since, there were only 29 responses, we can't be conclusive about that. However, we did feel that the distributors would be well served if somebody did this.

So WE decided to. Start watching the results of our surveys on your service performance in the eyes of your distributor customers. It starts today... with the Lamp category. (Click here for a look)

There are a couple of key takeaways we get from this.

First: Listening to the customer, no matter how structured or unstructured, needs to be encouraged and driven from the top. So, CEO's don't ignore your people's desire to do this! And if they aren't asking to do this or already doing it, you should be worried.

Second,  It doesn't seem that most companies have organized feedback systems and disciplines in place. Listening is probably most often random, and because of that, filtered by the sender. You're not going to hear what you need to hear this way. Plus, you won't get enough quantity of responses at any point in time to be able to perform adequate analyses and make good, timely decisions. Isn't that what listening is for?

Neil Gillespie