Before start a Benchmark, try this!

Ask the employee, "Are you a customer of the company you work for? Why?"

Regardless of the answer to the first question, we need to ask the second one! “Why?”

If the employee who works for a B2C company is not a consumer of the product he participates in delivering, something can be wrong with the company's strategy.

Let's think. The employee buys a product or a service from a competitor of his company. Why? Why we can not attract that customer that we know so well? Why did he choose to hire the competitor?

Isn't seeing what competitors are doing and what they are attractive to customers something that can be used to bring about product change? Why not start the feedback with the “insider”?

Sure, the profile may be a different focus for the company, but are we not losing something?

On the other hand, If he is a customer of the company, we also need to ask “why”. It is not because he has already been conquered that we do not need to reinforce the positive points that made him choose to be a customer. This can be a differential of the company that we need to reinforce in order not to lose out on the changes in product strategies.

In a Gizmodo article, in 2012, an inside rule from Microsoft was published regarding the purchases made by the Sales, Marketing, Services, IT & Operations Group. With 46 thousand employees distributed worldwide, it was forbidden the purchase “Apple Products” with company resources.

Satya Nadella changed the strategy in 2014, giving more space for the use of products and partnerships with companies that were already a reference in certain technologies. It allowed the free distribution of Office for iPads and iPhones, added a partnership with RedHat, and signed high investments with Google in the development of Microsoft applications on Android, abandoning the Mobiles strategy with Nokia, which had been acquired years before and which was accumulating losses.

The strategy was updated in the way that the market reacted, and not only through external research, but also from the employees themselves. The vision and input of the most important assets of the company, the employees, are indispensable in directing priority actions for the business.

It is about the company not making products that people are forced to have, but rather products that customers want to buy.

In an innovative world, defending tradition is increasingly unfeasible.