Project Experience

Understanding Competitor's Process Helps Explain Account Wins and Losses and Future Moves Required to Compete

Client Situation
By understanding customers' needs and reasons for switching suppliers, companies can avoid account losses. Our client is a provider of data to the packaged goods industry. Account losses can be devastating since contracts tend to be relatively long. Due to recent account losses, our client wanted to better understand the true reasons for this defection…whether it was speed of data delivery, customer service or price, for example, so that it could prevent further losses from occurring.

Fuld Approach
In conversations with a number of customers, we learned that customers did not recognize the value of our client's offering to justify the higher price and longer delivery time, based on how they used the data.

Benefits and Implications
This finding highlighted fundamental differences in our client's and its competitor's processes and the need for our client to change its production processes or services offered to stem further account losses. We provided direction on what processes and products that could yield a higher price and margin. For more information on wins and losses in consumer products, contact Michael Sandman at msandman@fuld.com.