Open letter to Presidents and CEOs

I’m Ann Amati, Deliberate Strategies Consulting’s Principal and chief interviewer. The service my firm provides may be unlike anything you’ve hired out before. I’d like to take this opportunity to give you a clearer understanding of what you gain from engaging us.

Click here to jump to Ann Amati’s background

My roots are in strategic planning where the process is to clearly define where the ideal “there” is, assess where today’s “here” is, then develop a road map connecting the two. In my work with you and your customers, the road map I develop answers the question, “What’s in our customers’ heads that can help us get from where we are to where we want to be?”

Most companies rely on internal resources to characterize customers' opinions. Because I'm an expert at business-to-business customer relations, I know how to solicit opinions your sales team wouldn't hear. First, given the process I use, I will probably gain access to more senior levels than your sales people meet with. Second, I think like a CEO; I’ll be listening for the strategic implications of the issues your customers raise and asking relevant follow-up questions. Finally, I’ll let the customers speak freely. I’m not going to argue with them. I’m not going to explain away their complaints, where a Sales or Service person who’s heard the complaints before might. If you assign a “customer survey” project to someone in your Marketing department, it’s unlikely the VP of Marketing will clear that person’s calendar to make room for a timely, thorough, methodical job. Again, his or her questions won’t be as insightful as mine would be, and it’s the quality of the questions that determines the richness of the feedback.

My overall mission is to help you create positive turning points in your customer relationships. Deliberate Strategies Consulting capitalizes on the fact that it is very difficult for one adult to look another in the eye and say, "This is how you’re disappointing me." They’ll say it to someone else, be it me as your surrogate or a sympathetic competitor saying anything they have to in order to steal the customer away from you. Too often by the time customers voluntarily give candid feedback to a vendor they view as falling short, they have already made the decision to leave. They have nothing to lose, so they’re willing to be honest. If I provide them with a safe forum for saying what's on their minds, you stand an excellent chance of turning the relationship around. Even so-so relationships can turn into great relationships once you hear what customers truly think about your company.

There are no rules about what I can ask your customers on your behalf. I can ask about your performance, products, people, processes, strategic direction—whatever. I can ask anything. Why they do business with you. Who else they’ve done business with and where the gap is between the two companies. What you need to start doing now to still be valuable to them two years from now. Under what circumstances they’d start evaluating other suppliers. What they’d buy from you if you started offering it. Anything. And it’s all open and aboveboard. This is not spy work. My mission is to help you create positive turning points in your customer relationships.

I do require that you have some sort of relationship in place with the companies you select. The most tenuous connection that works is a "lost opportunity" where the prospect seriously considered your company but went with another supplier. "Lost opportunities" won’t talk long, but you can learn a lot from them and from your former customers.

Not only will I hear the feedback that’s hard for customers to give you directly, I’ll also hear compliments they would never stop to give you. Compliments are fodder for your marketing material.

Because they know I don’t work for you, a customer will often say, "Before I answer your question, let me explain the context." They'll go on to give me background information that someone in your company may already know but that might be real news to you.

I listen for comprehensive messages behind what your individual customers tell me. You'll get not only their literal feedback, but additionally what I heard to be the composite point your customers were making and the related strategic implications. There's no argument that an outsider's insights can be the launching point of a company's next phase. Here’s a story of when I was that outsider: One of my software clients had "job shop" roots. They co-developed a fairly sophisticated application with one of their Fortune 100 clients. They had a joint-venture agreement to sell the application to other companies in that same industry (other Fortune 100 customers). I discovered they were blind to how big the gap was between their self image as a "job shop" and their customers’ need for them to behave as a software vendor.

CEOs hate to admit they don’t know as much as they want to know, or even as much as they think they know. By the time information gets up to you, it’s been heavily filtered and spun. You remember what it was like earlier in your career? You were cautious about what you shared with your boss, and he or she undoubtedly toned down any controversial information before passing it upwards. Further, it is likely customers only shared part of the truth with their salesperson in the first place because nobody likes confrontation. You don’t stand a chance of hearing the whole truth using internal resources. What I can do for you is get the customer to speak freely to me, then report back to you everything I heard. I’m willing to tell you things you might not like hearing, and I’ve been "shot for insubordination" by clients who couldn’t take the truth. That’s fine. To take my fee yet withhold information your customers gave me in good faith believing I’d pass it on to you is stealing, and I don’t stay in business by stealing from my customers. Because I deliver the whole truth, I guarantee you will read things in my report that you will feel compelled to take immediate action on. It’s not unusual for companies to recapture our fee through the margin on the rescued relationships and reinvigorated sales our project plays a role in facilitating.

Here’s another story: I had a CEO tell me at the start of a project, "All of our customers love us." I thought it was odd that the first customer I interviewed was the one customer who didn’t love them. Then I got to the second customer. Hmm, the first two customers are the two that don’t love this company. The first three. . . . As it turned out, the only customers who didn’t loathe this company were the ones who hadn’t been working with them long enough to learn what they were really like. This CEO was completely blind to his customers’ needs. My report tore his eyelids off.

If you can conceptualize turning candid feedback about your people, products and processes into sales, you can benefit from what Deliberate Strategies Consulting can do for you. Go back to the Case Studies page. If you can relate to any of the companies there, give me a call.

Biography
Ann Amati helps companies increase business-to-business sales through the unique process she uses to research customer feedback. She has unparalleled expertise in engaging even the busiest executive in a thought-provoking discussion about a key supplier. She is skilled at uncovering what the decision-maker or influencer thinks, why and what actions the supplier needs to take to optimize each customer relationship. Ask to review the impressive list of companies whose executives and managers Ms. Amati has interviewed.

A former strategic planner, Ms. Amati has accurately defined problems and formulated results-oriented solutions for over twenty years.

After receiving her Masters of Hospital Administration (University of Missouri, 1982), Ms. Amati spent five years as a business development analyst and strategic planner at major medical centers. She left health care and joined private industry in 1987. She served as a program manager, project manager and consultant in high-tech, financial services and specialty consulting firms until leaving to found Deliberate Strategies Consulting in 1994.