A three-part series for Finnish leaders, for those who can read to the end.
Average sales growth for our customers
Completed project
Internationalisation project in the Nordic countries and Europe
The minutes of the board meeting do not say what happened in the room. The minutes say this: “It was determined that the company’s business was not viable and it was decided to proceed with an orderly wind-down.” It’s a genre. Legalese. The language of putting shame on the record.
Around the table it was rougher.
The CEO, with a quarter of a century of sales experience and three previous exits behind him, said one sentence and fell silent:
There it was. Two years of work. Well over a million euros of owners’ money. Seven employees who had believed in a hastily drawn picture of a customer who did not exist. All summed up in three words that were never said.
Three words that had been replaced by something more dangerous. Assumptions. By feel. With that magical Finnish word we use so proudly: mutulla.
Imagine the next board meeting. Discussing next year’s budget, new launch, sales growth target. The atmosphere is good. The charts are going up.
Then someone, usually the oldest or the newest, asks out loud:
And the room changes. Not dramatically, just subtly. Someone looks at the table. The CFO reviews the latest NPS numbers, and they weren’t bad. The sales manager refers to what he heard from the largest customer yesterday. Marketing mentions ongoing segmentation work.
Every answer is true. And none is the answer to a question.
What happens in the room is a tacit agreement: no one demands an honest answer because no one has one.
For decades, Finnish industry could live without a deep understanding of the customer. The competitive advantage lay elsewhere: cheap electricity, skilled engineering, quality fit for Germany. The product did the work. The customer returned because the alternatives were inferior.
That world is over. First, the cheap factories in the cheap countries copied the products. Then software companies copied each other’s features within weeks. Now AI copies the whole development cycle: you can ask a machine to make the same product as your competitor and have it tested tomorrow.
There remains one thing that cannot be copied: how you understand your customer better than they understand themselves. Knowledge that comes from hundreds of encounters and years of listening. Your competitor would have to rebuild it from scratch.
The Americans call this the moat, a sustainable competitive advantage for consultancies. Finns don’t have a word for it because we’re not used to thinking about the whole thing. We trust that if we do a good job, the client will come back.
I have some bad news. The customer will not return. Not if someone else understands their needs half a second before you do.
But here’s the good news that most people miss: this competitive advantage does not require a multi-million investment or a five-year programme. It requires an honest question, asked correctly. Few of your competitors will do that. Therein lies your advantage.
Anttila. Every Finn has a memory of Anttila. The Christmas catalogue, which had been torn up by Christmas Eve. NetAnttila, one of the pioneers of online shopping in Finland. When Kesko sold Anttila to 4K Invest in March 2015 for €1 million, the store passed on decades of branding. In July 2016, the company was in bankruptcy.
However, the collapse did not start in 2015. Anttila had it all: brand, locations, online store, mail order tradition. What it didn’t have was the courage to ask honestly: who is our customer in 2015 and why would they buy from us and not from Verkkokauppa.com, Zalando or IKEA?
The question was not asked because the answer would have been uncomfortable. The buying customer was someone other than the one for whom the Anttila was built. The competitors were built around the new customer from the start. Anttila was trying to transfer the old model to the network and be both old and new. Therefore it was neither.
One Suomi24 panellist summed it up better than any consultant report:
Anttila did not fall in the competition. It failed because it had stopped knowing its customer and had not realised it had stopped.
Nokia. A company with best-in-class engineering, global market research, user panels and focus groups. And yet: the touch screen was not taken seriously. When Apple’s first iPhone was introduced in 2007, Nokia’s management publicly dismissed it as a curiosity that did not threaten the market leader. Six years later, the mobile phone business was sold to Microsoft as it stood.
Why didn’t a company that had all the resources to research the customer see what every user saw?
Because the Nokia customer only existed within Nokia. Decades of research had built him up: a conservative, price-conscious, battery-life-conscious person who wanted a keyboard. This customer had not been invented. He actually existed back in 2005. But by 2009, he had been replaced by someone else.
Nokia’s customer insight was the best money could buy, five years earlier. The customer was changing faster than understanding could keep up.
Anttila forgot to ask a new customer. He thought he knew his client because he had once. The client changed, Anttila didn’t.
Nokia asked the wrong customer. It was professionally investigating the customer who was yesterday, not the one who was getting up.
Two stories, one lesson. The winner is the one who asks an honest question, gets an honest answer and has the courage to act on it. The loser is the one who doesn’t ask at all, asks too late or asks the wrong person.
If you are a CEO or a board member, you have one primary task: to keep the company alive. Not the growth figures, not the operating margin, not the sustainability reports, not the brand value. Survival first, then everything else.
Staying alive no longer depends on how well you execute. It depends on doing the right things. And the right things don’t come from within the management team. They are found where the customer makes the decisions: at 2.30pm on a Thursday, hungry and tired, when the budget has just been frozen. That context doesn’t show up on your dashboard or in the NPS survey.
It only shows when someone asks an honest question and the customer answers honestly. Which is not self-evident, but we’ll come back to that in Part Two.
When I talk about these things in a room full of leaders, the typical reaction comes around the twenty-minute mark. The leader nods, turns to a colleague and says:
And there you are. With the right insight, making a choice that might be more expensive than the assumption you just got rid of.
Matti. Internal Matti. A mate who goes through the customers his organisation has known for fifteen years. A mate who sends out a survey that is only answered by the satisfied. The Matti who reports upwards a finding that confirms what management decided yesterday.
Matti is not the enemy. Matti is an honest person. Matti is trapped.
The trap is that your own organisation cannot examine itself honestly. Not because it doesn’t want to, but because psychology won’t let it. There are three human biases that make internal customer research more dangerous than not doing it. They are what even the best researchers fall into when the research subject is their own employer.
These three distortions will be discussed in the next section. At the same time, we’ll find out why your customer is lying to you right now, without even realising it.
Before that, one question. Look at your calendar. When was the last time you were in a one-hour conversation where the customer talked more than you and the topic was not your product but his work?
If the answer is “I don’t remember”, the problem is probably bigger than you think.
If the answer is “never”, the problem is probably bigger than you think.
If the answer is “last week”, you should probably write this blog series, not me.
The second part of the series unpacks three human biases that often make internal customer research more dangerous than not doing it. Be the first to subscribe to the ad or book a chat with us now.
