I remember being in Boston on a business trip in April, the same day as the Boston Marathon. Something you should know about me is I like to run to stay in shape, but I am a fair weather runner. If it is cold and rainy, or if you live where I do, snowy and icy, then I would rather stay indoors. If I were traveling to a warm weather state – say Florida, I would take along my running shoes. But if I were going to Minnesota, forget it! So as I was traveling back home from a day in Boston, I was on a plane with dozens of people who had flown in to town to run the most prestigious marathon in the United States. You could tell who these people were because, a. they were very trim, and b. they were all wearing a Boston Marathon finisher's medal around their necks. The guy sitting next to me asked if I was a runner. How would you have answered that question if you were me? These runners never stop training regardless of the weather. In fact, they have to run a minimum qualifying time in another marathon to get into the Boston Marathon. Quite frankly, I have never felt so out of shape in my life as I did on that plane.

Self-examination can be a humbling experience. Seeing how you measure up will expose us for who we really are. But if you want to get better – like being a marathon runner – you have to get past all the obstacles we put in our way and get to the reality of the situation.

It should be no surprise that the mention of a self-examination of ones marketing efforts leaves some business leaders with trembling hands and weak knees. For this reason, a lot of business leaders decide to skip tools like a SWOT analysis. Then they wonder why they are losing customers to their competition. A SWOT* (it is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is simply a tool that forces us to examine our efforts and make changes to be more successful. It can be used in several different ways. The way I like to use it is examining current customers and new opportunities. Today I want to focus on your strengths and weaknesses from your customer's point of view. Next week we will examine opportunities and threats in expanding your market with new offerings.

When we are dealing with strengths and weaknesses, I like to start with the target market you should know the best: your current customers. Why did they buy from you in the first place? It may be that your price was competitive. It could be that your product/service quality was good and you solved a problem for them. You also might have solved any glitches they experienced along the way, like getting over an unexpected hurdle in the sales process. Any of these could be listed as strengths. But what about the customers who were dissatisfied with you? What happened in their situation? Were they upset with the type of customer service they received? Were you late in delivering your product/service? Whatever the reason, list these under weaknesses. Now ask yourself an honest question. If I fixed whatever caused the negative reaction from those customers, would they still be my customer? If the answer is yes, you have some work to do. You need to shore up the weaknesses in your sales and marketing process. However, if the answer is no – in other words, they would have left me regardless of making things right with them – then you may be chasing the wrong target. This is more common than you think. Do you remember MySpace? It was the first social media site where you could create your own profile, load photos, and follow celebrities. In the early 2000s, it was the most visited site on the web. It targeted children – particularly teenagers – and a lot of unsavory predators. Along came Facebook, and the kids jumped ship. MySpace lost its place when the teenagers left. With a much more family-friendly environment, FB also started attracting the kids’ parents. All it took was one or two parental "lol” comments on a teenager’s post and they abandoned the FB ship. To survive, Facebook had to realize they could not do a thing to keep those teenagers unless they had an entirely different format. That’s why they purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion. MySpace did not react soon enough to keep their target and went into a tailspin. Facebook realized it had to do something to keep the teenage market, so it gave them a new format. And in the end, FB came away with two groups of customers: parents and their teenage kids.

Here is why I like to use the customer’s perspective in a SWOT. Too many times we think we know what the customer is thinking, and we even fool ourselves into thinking that if a customer leaves us, it was all their problem. Naming your own strengths and weaknesses gets skewed either way: too many strengths - if we are trying to convince ourselves that everything is roses – or too many weaknesses – if we are convinced that we need to blow up the business and start over again. In either case, the truth gets lost in the extremes. Measuring your strengths and weaknesses from your customers’ experience will help you see this. That means you need to get their honest opinions of your business and offerings. That can be accomplished with a customer satisfaction survey, asking a few key clients to do a 360 Degree Feedback assessment, or it may mean taking the time to sit down with them and asking them to honestly tell you where you are doing well and where you are falling short. However you obtain this information, it is crucial for you to get into your customer’s skin and see what they see. From there, you can assess what needs to be patched up and what needs to be thrown out.

Now back to the Boston Marathon. When I got home, I had to look at my image in the mirror and make a decision: did I want to be a serious runner that would work out year round regardless of any obstacles or did I want to be a middle aged man who walked the dog each night for exercise. If I wanted to be a runner, I needed to make some changes. And if I wanted to be the dog walker, I needed to quit playing the mental game that I was something just short of an Olympic athlete. Honesty does wonders for your ego and for your marketing plans.

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*The SWOT Analysis was used and developed by Albert S. Humphrey of the Stanford Institute in the 1960s. The original author is unknown.