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	Winning Customer Orders Part 2 of 3
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	WINNING OR LOSING CUSTOMER ORDERS Markets consist of customers, and customers buy from suppliers through ordering mechanisms. In their buying process, customers consider two sets of criteria:     * order qualifiers—These are the criteria that the customer implicitly or explicitly applies to decide whether a vendor will be considered as a valid supplier for his procurement purpose. The APICSDictio­ nary, 8th edition, describes order qualifiers as "those competitive characteristics that a firm must exhibit to be a viable competitor in the marketplace. For example, a firm may seek to compete on char­ acteristics other than price, but in order to qualify to compete, its costs and the related price must be within a certain range to be con­ sidered by its customers." * order winners—These are the criteria that the customer implicitly or explicitly applies to decide which supplier will be the one that will be given the order for delivery of products or services. The APICS Dictionary, 8th edition, describes order winners as "those competitive characteristics that cause a firm's customers to choose that firm's products and services over those of its competitors. Or­ der winners can be considered to be competitive advantage of the firm. Order winners usually focus on one (rarely more than two) of the following strategic initiatives: price/cost, quality, delivery speed,delivery reliability, product design, flexibility, aftermarket service, and image." Though these definitions are certainly nice from a theo­retical point of view, it is often reasonably difficult to get a clear and objective picture on these criteria in the real world. Evidence shows that more often than not, people inter­nal to the firm—including most sales and account manag­ers—do not have a clear view of the order qualifiers and winners! It is our experience that, when careful analysis is done of actual customer order buying criteria and of cus­tomer buying pattern interviewing, the resulting order win­ners/qualifiers are often quite different from what sales, marketing, and account managers thought about them. So, our advice is not to automatically accept the per­ceived order winner and order qualifying criteria that people from the firm define. Instead: •   Ask the customer directly. There are, however a few hidden problems with this approach in that it may not be easy to determine who should be the interviewer (one from the firm or an external person) and who should be your interviewee in the customer organization (the pur­chasing manager, or the buyer, or someone else, or all of the above). In setting up customer interviews to figure out order winners and qualifiers, careful planning should include discussion and decision-making on these aspects. Another issue is the technique to be used to identify these order winners and qualifiers. The problem is that a buyer—at the outset—always wants all criteria satisfied at very high performance levels. What we need to find out, however, is which of these criteria is really top priority. Although there exist very sophis­ticated statistical techniques to obtain a ranking among a large set of criteria, resolving ranking conflicts in the process, there is a very simple but quite effective technique that you can use. Write all pos­sible criteria on cards in a card deck, give it to the interviewee, and ask him/her to put the most important ones (e.g., no more than five) on one side. That allows you then to dig deeper in these criteria quite rapidly. •   Analyze customer orders won and prospects lost over the recent past and deduce from them what made you win or lose the order. This can be very powerful if done well. As a result you obtain the order quali­ fiers and winners for a large set of real customer orders. This allows you to search for clusters of orders that all have identical or very comparable order winning and order qualifying criteria. And that is exactly what we are looking for, as these clusters are the basis for analyzing how supply chains can be focused on specific customer expectations. One drawback of this approach is that it only picks up information from the past. Therefore it should be limited to the re­ cent past and combined with customer interviews in order to validate that the findings are in line with future developments. 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