Let me pick up where I left off from my last entry when I mentioned how the Select & Connect Study wrongly insinuates that you-as a marketing professional-are to blame for the disconnect that exists between companies and customers. If you didn't read the first post in this series, you can find it here.

Reality Check
The Real Reason Why Leadership Fails to Make Smart Sales and Ops Decisions

Let's not beat around the bush. Leadership at most companies is smart. Leading companies don't get to be "who" and "what" they are by stumbling into a good product, service or solution, or by "guessing" what the market wants and then making operational and strategy decisions based on guesswork. No, the movement of companies is based on "customers." It's leadership's knowledge of what the customer wants-or at least on what they think the customer wants-that drives strategy and operations and, thus, the bottom line. In this regard, the Select & Connect study is correct: the customer (or, as we at The Phelon Group say, the voice of the customer) wields enormous power, which is why marketing organizations, yours included I'm sure, spend hundreds of thousands to multiple millions in efforts to identify, profile and retain customers of value.

But the problem-thus the solution-does not lie with marketing's inability to capture or access this voice of the customer gold. It lies with using customer data to make smart decisions. After all, you can be awash in customer data and dwelling amidst a sea of steadily climbing satisfaction and loyalty numbers and still see little or no impact on the bottom line.

The trouble is that data alone does not a "customer-connected" enterprise make. Most large companies now spend millions each year gathering customer feedback. Surveys and customer intelligence gets doled out across the enterprise, yet independent decisions about how to interpret and apply what customers said are made regionally-or worse departmentally-and are not applied across the business. Promises to improve profits, increase loyalty or stop customer churn never materialize because the customer voice has been fragmented and distilled to the evaporation point.

What most often happens is that marketing professionals fall into the trap of focusing on the "survey" instead of on the "so what". And when marketing misses this key point, it then misses the real voice of its customer. You wind up lacking the very insight you need to effectively brand and position your company. And you are without the right data and intelligence to effectively go after markets/companies/buyers with a winning strategy.

Not having the right voice of the customer can cripple your organization because it creates a dangerous, challenging-to-address tendency: focusing on the wrong customers. Leaders at smart companies know who their most vocal, loyal and profitable customers are and HOW to keep them.

What they don't know-and don't act on-is the sad statistic that every five years most companies have lost a significant portion of their customers. Most companies focus on the loudest customers-the demanding ones-and lose those who are or who could become loyal, vocal and, in many cases, profitable advocates. They lose their promoters.

Marketing is indeed the right organization to build the case and momentum for voice of the customer as a critical lynchpin to the company. But the truth is that without sales... without finance... without operations and delivery... and without senior management... you're really facing an uphill battle to effect change. The spirit and commitment to become customer-led and customer-profitable must come from the top.

Be sure to read tomorrow's post for the meat... the alchemic actions you can begin taking to turn your customer data to gold.