A fantastic way to understand how and where you help your customers is to become their customer first.

This will help you identify friction points, inefficiencies, and opportunities where your products or services could help improve the overall customer experience.

This is also the best type of research which can help you develop a tailored point of view that will resonate well with Senior Executives who are invested in better serving their customers.

It shows them you’ve done your homework and can bring immediate value.

Finally, it helps you build immediate rapport since you are already a customer of theirs.

Here are a few examples of how you can do this:

1. Call into their customer service department and see how easy or hard it is to get an issue resolved

2. Sign up for their newsletter and see the quality and quantity of the communications they send out

3. Use their mobile app or visit their online portals to see what the user experience is like

4. Visit their physical or online stores and see how their products are sold.

5. Read what their employees are saying on Glassdoor and identify where the employee experience could be improved

Once you’ve done this firsthand research, then it’s time to establish your point of view on how and where you can help.

Finally, you need to share it with the leaders who care most. For example, if your POV is related to their online store, the VP of eCommerce would be a prime candidate to hear this message.

The more you know about your customers, the more you know how and where you can help them.

In today’s video, I share how my team used this strategy when positioning a large deal at Petco several years ago to differentiate in a highly competitive deal.