Recently an entrepreneur was telling me about a customer he lost due to a missing feature in the product. The customer absolutely had to have this feature, and without it, wouldn’t be moving forward. Naturally, the entrepreneur was depressed thinking he needed to add this new feature right away. Hearing this I asked a few quick questions:
- Do 80% of your ideal customers need that feature?
- Is that feature the highest priority?
- Was your relationship with the customer strong enough that they were telling you the whole story?
That last question is the most important.
Most customers that point out a single feature for leaving are doing that as a nice way out.
The reality is that more times than not the customer was sold by the sales rep of a competing product. It’s true, the competing-product sales rep provided talking points to the customer and gave an easy way out with competitive intel — being outsold is never fun but it happens all the time. The next time you hear that your customer is switching because of a missing feature, remember that your company got outsold by a competitor.
What else? Do you agree that when a customer leaves for one single feature they were sold by a competitor’s sales rep?
David Cummings on Startups 