Lessons Your Customers Want You to Learn

Invest in relationships, and get involved early in the project.

We started our book CoDestiny with a chapter titled “Your Customers Want More—and They Will Pay You for It.”  Over and over, we have found that customers want their suppliers to be successful and deliver more. The adversarial relationships that we see in business markets most often result from a failure to deliver value rather than a deliberate strategy on the customers’ part to keep their suppliers at arm’s length. Customers can teach their suppliers some helpful lessons.An interview we conducted recently with an individual responsible for road and bridge projects demonstrates an example of two such lessons. During the interview, this individual told the following story:

“A while ago, we were holding the first public meeting on a new project, getting input from the community.  That’s one of the early steps in a long process before any project becomes a reality.  I noticed the head of one of the local construction firms in the audience and was a little surprised to see him there.  Anyhow, the meeting went OK, with one major concern coming up and a lot of minor issues.  A few days later, the same contractor, who didn’t say a word at the public meeting, came by my office and said ‘I have a few ideas [about the concern that came up at the meeting].’  We talked for a while, and he did have some good ideas—ones we hadn’t thought of before.  Now I won’t tell you that we’re going to award jobs just because someone shows up at a public meeting, but I sure do want to have contractors that are on the same page, know the issues and think it’s part of their job to help us solve them.”

Be Proactive

This contractor did two things right.  He got involved very early in the project, long before the specs were written in stone, and he worked to understand the issues that would later define success.  He also invested time in building a relationship with the customer—not just by being friendly but also bringing genuine value and showing that the relationship was one worth sustaining.

Empahsize Value

 Construction firms that get involved early and emphasize the value they can deliver to their customers are the winners. They gain a “relationship advantage,” which leverages their position before the bidding war begins. The relationship advantage does not overcome glaring deficiencies in poor quality work or uncompetitive prices, but it can certainly help companies stand out  from the competition.

Getting involved early in projects often has a major benefit of influencing specs.  We often hear people say, “They just didn’t give us credit [for some idea or offering] because it wasn’t in the specs or part of the evaluation criteria.”  In most instances, we learned that the specs and evaluation criteria had been written long before the company got involved in the process.  Their ideas may have been good, but they were too late.

Invest the Time

People often assume that procurement processes and competition will make it impossible to become part of a “win-win” relationship. But we think that assumption is wrong.  We have never talked to a company, in any industry, that could not provide examples of “supplier success stories.”  What we find to be in short supply are companies that make the investments necessary to realize the benefits of building such relationships.

Try This

Ask these questions to win the bid and build strong customer relationships.

1. What value can you offer to the customer to win the job?
2. What must happen to prepare for a successful project? 
3. How will the customer measure the project as a success or a failure? Is it early completion, reporting no safety incidents, resolving a technical issue or addressing budget concerns?

Construction Business Owner, April 2011