ha-va.com | Export Manager | Export Partner DACH-PL-CZ
Understanding Before Improvement: How Real Insights Drive Partner Performance
I was recently involved in an audit for a company that wanted to better understand the performance of its distributors. They handed us a neat list – names grouped, each with a short opinion attached.
The Risk of Assumptions in Distributor Audits
Many of these opinions, we quickly discovered, came from people who had never spoken to those distributors. They had never asked what local conditions they were working under. Some opinions were shaped by office folklore, others by regional stereotypes – “they’re lazy in that country” or “that region’s just difficult”. It was fiction, dressed as fact.
Surface Impressions vs. Real Experience
I was reminded of this a while ago when watching a car review on YouTube. The reviewer was articulate and confident – perhaps too confident. He criticised the car for things that, in my experience, turned out to be irrelevant in daily use. He also praised features that didn’t quite work the way he thought they did. It became clear he’d driven the car for, perhaps, three hours – just enough to film something, not nearly enough to understand the machine.
Living With the Product Reveals Its Reality
You don’t really understand something by reading about it in a book – any more than you understand a city by looking at its map. You have to use it. Regularly. You have to live with it a bit – bump into its limits, discover its quirks, see what it gets right, and where it lets you down. That’s where the learning happens.
You can’t assess a product or a technology from the outside. You have to live with it. Work with it. Give it time. Let it show you what it’s really made of.
Real Dialogue Uncovers Real Obstacles
So we did the work; we spoke to every distributor. Took the time to understand their business logic, their challenges, and how they saw the partnership with the client – the manufacturer. We discovered real obstacles: miscommunication, mismatched expectations, and in some cases, structural issues. None of which were visible from the surface. And all of which can now be addressed – because we stopped guessing and started listening.
The Core Principle: No Improvement Without Understanding
I’ll share more about this case in future posts, but here’s the core message: you can’t improve what you haven’t taken the time to understand. And understanding requires presence. Effort. Curiosity. No shortcuts.