The fourth quadrant comprises change-ripe customers, who, like the delegators, hire expertise they themselves lack but, unlike the delegators, insist on staying personally involved in the job. In remodeling a house, for example, a collaborator would not only team up with a designer; he or she would work side by side with the expert to create the best-suited outcome.
Collaborators are not to be confused with kibitzers, meddlers, or control freaks. An authentic collaborator genuinely appreciates the depth of knowledge and practical skills of well-chosen experts. Such collaborators respond well to suppliers—such as a truly devoted banker—who offer themselves as coaches, mentors, or partners in launching a customer’s new business venture.
Some collaborators go a step further: They hire professional expertise and guidance to attain better results than they could achieve on their own, but they are convinced that their own insights and knowledge of their field will be critical aspects of the eventual solution. However talented the collaborator’s architect is, this client needs to tell him or her that the manufacturing area of the new plant will almost surely shrink in five years as outsourcing progresses. Then the client and architect will work together to plan what will expand into that space and how it can be designed for both uses.
The Internet has vaulted collaboration into one of the world’s growth industries. By 2003, some analysts predict, 62 percent of all industrial spending on e-business will go to support the implementation and maintenance of new technology. Only 29 percent of the spending will pay for hardware, and a mere 9 percent for software. As in the emergence of railroads, the digital evolution has progressed from creating technology to applying it—in a word, to services. The winners are service providers so reliable that their customers increasingly make them partners.
When market leaders understand the shifting attitudes and priorities of new customers, they find it much easier to evaluate the buying decisions of those customers. One reason that the laggards can’t catch up to the leaders is that the less vigorous companies fail to recognize customers‘ distinctive purchasing patterns; hence, they treat buyers as a generic group.
I am not the first to note that New Economy companies, in particular, are sending mixed messages to the marketplace by appealing to customers in contradictory ways. If one day they speak to search-and-browsers, the next day it is toward streamliners or delegators that their efforts seem aimed. As a result, customers are confused, which inevitably translates into sales lost to rivals that position themselves consistently. This is a self-inflicted wound at the moment when clarity is the most direct and best route to a customer’s heart.
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