If they don’t care, it doesn’t matter

A pair of engineers left their corporate jobs and started up their own consulting company.  One of them had lots of experience in electrical engineering, the other in plumbing, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.  They counted among their clients architects and water parks.

These engineers took great pride in their standards.  While most other consulting engineering companies, including the ones they had left, handed off the work of converting hand-drawn plans into precision CAD drawings to draftsmen, assistants, or interns, these guys did all the CAD work themselves.  To them, this commitment to quality is what set them apart from their competition, and they trumpeted this difference on their web site and in all their marketing materials.

Interviews with some of the firm’s clients told a different story.  While they all agreed that these engineers did great CAD drawings, none of the clients felt that the CAD drawings coming out of this firm were any better than the drawings coming out of the firms that gave the drawings to underlings to do.  The unanimous philosophy was I don’t care who does the drawings as long as they get done and they’re accurate. In other words, the firm’s clients had confidence that any engineering firm’s CAD drawings will be perfectly fine, regardless of the process to create them, as long as the person who reviews the drawings knows what he/she is doing.

This engineering firm cared about who does CAD drawings, but its clients didn’t.  The first right thing the firm did was try to discover the truth, even though they already thought they knew what it was.  The second right thing the firm did was ask questions in a way that would give them useful information.

Questions that would not have helped these engineers discover the truth about the importance of who does the CAD drawings:

• Are you satisfied with the CAD drawings produced by XYZ Engineers?
• How satisfied are you with the CAD drawings produced by XYZ Engineers?
• What do you like about the CAD drawings produced by XYZ Engineers?
• How do you compare XYZ’s CAD drawings with those of its competition?

The reason these are not helpful is that they all assume that CAD drawings hold the same importance in their clients’ organizations that they do in their own.  Better questions:

• Talk about the process you used in finding an engineer for your last project.  What were you looking for?
• Which engineering firms were you considering for such-and-so project?  How were these firms similar to or different from one another?
• How did you end up including XYZ Engineers on the short list of engineering firms you work with?  When you choose one to work with, how do you choose?

Notice that none of these asks about CAD drawings.  (We did ask them about CAD drawings eventually, out of curiosity.  It turns out that who does the CAD drawings is so not important to the firm’s clients that they were actually surprised the topic came up.)

If you want to find out what’s important, you need to ask what’s important.  Sometimes people don’t know what’s important — actually, most of the time people don’t know what’s really important to them because we make most of our decisions unconsciously — but by steering respondents down a narrow path, we close ourselves off from finding out something potentially really cool and interesting.

As it turned out, there was something that differentiated this engineering firm in the minds of its clients: the size of the firm.  Clients didn’t care who the CAD drawings got handed off to, but they cared who they got handed off to.  This small firm had big credentials, but it wasn’t so big that clients would get lost in a queue or delegated to junior engineers.  On top of that, because it was a two-man firm, instead of a sole enterprise, clients knew that if one guy couldn’t come to the phone, the other one would — the entire company wouldn’t shut down if someone caught the flu.

A much better place to live in the heads of one’s clients — that the firm takes care of clients in a way that neither smaller nor larger firms can — and much more difficult for a competitor to replicate.

Moral: Whatever it is that matters to you about your business, if it doesn’t matter to your customers, it’s not the bait you should be using to try to lure new customers in.  This is not to say that you shouldn’t pay attention to these important things — good CAD drawings are important — but whatever you are saying about your business to differentiate it from your competitors needs to be a difference that matters to your customers.

Lesson: When you’re trying to get to the heart of where your business lives in people’s heads — this is called positioning — the smartest place to begin is with people in whose heads your product already lives, that is, your customers.  If your product or service already lives where you want it to live with your happy customers, then you can figure out how to go out and look for more people like them to make happy.

Don’t assume you know what matters — watch what customers do, ask them why they do what they do, and listen to the questions they ask you.  That will get you started on understanding matters to them.  Beware of your own blinders, those biases that prevent you from inviting people to tell you the whole truth.