Collaboration with Customers

I'm reading an interesting new book called "We are Smarter than Me: How to unleash the power of crowds in your business." (See required reading.) In it, authors Barry Libert and Jon Spector give lots of interesting examples about how companies benefit from collaborating with customers.

Many small business owners shy away from letting their customers collaborate.  They are afraid it will get out of their control.  That's precisely the point.  Letting customers have a say in the enhancement of your products or the improvement of your website can be valuable.  You just need the right attitude.

What are the possible benefits of collaborating with customers?  Libert and Spector list:

• Invent new products
• Improve customer service
• Boost sales
• Turbocharge manufacturing
• New sources of finance
• Everyone is a leader
• Makes you more productive and profitable
• Makes your company a better place to work

If you have been holding on tightly to the reins of control, think about it.

Comments

[Stephanie Diamond]

Newt, great comment. One of the things that small business owners should realize is that their vendors, resellers and others can work together as a bigger 'company' that can be leveraged to create products and services. Now that the Web makes location irrelevant and provides tools to easily work together, there's no reason why they shouldn't think about collaboration and joint ventures.

[Newt Barrett]

Stephanie, this is a great post. It makes me think of a project I'm working on now that involves helping a manufacturer create an online interactive installation manual that will make it much easier for their resellers to install pretty sophisticated automated equipment. As it is now everything gets done once at a time. Implementing this will require a high degree of collaboration between multiple resellers and the primary vendor. But the outcome should be a very close relationship with the vendor and all of their resellers --- giving them a pretty significant competitive edge versus their competitors. This won't be easy, but the payoff should be significant.
Newt
Newt