I know, everyone body says, “We are constantly gathering feedback from our customers.” The problem is the feedback is filtered: Filtered through the minds of your sales team, strained through the conversations of busy customer service types and sometimes percolated via your supply-partners' sales teams. What’s more, your customers are nice people. Mostly, they don’t like to report bad things. A few don’t take the time to think deep thoughts about their future direction and potential for outgrowing your brand of service. Extending the point further, very few (I’ve only met one in the past 20 years) distributors arm those in contact with their customers with a measurable way of collecting customer feelings on various topics. The results speak for themselves with distributors losing key chunks of business “unexpectedly” even though the move would take months of effort on the customer’s side. An occasional conversation with customers about future direction doesn’t show tre...