1. What can I do to make you more effective?
2. What’s keeping you from falling asleep at night?
3. What one thing should I do more? (or one thing I should do less?)
4. What roadblocks are holding you back? (or preventing your projects from moving ahead?)
5. What’s the most important issue you are dealing with right now?
6. What do our competitors do better than us?
7. If you were in my job, what’s the first thing you would you do?
8. What do we do better than anyone else?
9. How can I improve your team’s productivity?
10. What are the two key behaviors of our leadership team?
11. What one thing can we do to make our weekly meeting more effective?
12. What are your top three goals for next month?
13. What’s waking you up at 3:00 in the morning?
14. When you think about our goals, what are we forgetting?
15. If I could do just one thing for you as a result of this discussion, what would it be?

Source: 15 Great Leadership Questions by John McKee | TechRepublic

• What information are we collecting?
• Where and how are we collecting it?
• Who owns it?
• Who has access to it?
• What are we doing with it?
• What would be the impact to the organization if it got into the wrong hands?
• What controls are in place?
• Are efforts to safeguard the information commensurate with its worth?
• Are we gathering unnecessary information that represents potential risk without opportunity for reward?
• Are we maximizing the value of what we collect?
• Could information have more value if we loosened restrictions on it?

Source: Lock It Up or Set It Free? by Ted DeZabala | Deloitte Review, Issue 6

• What compromises does our current business model force customers to make?
• Why are nonusers or defectors dissatisfied with our offering?
• Do we offer customers a better value proposition than that of the competition?
• What alternative models are gaining share at the edges of our industry?
• If we were an industry outsider, what would we do to take advantage of the gaps or weaknesses in our business model?
• Do we have a plan for identifying potential business models, implementing them, and embedding BMI capabilities within the organization?
• What do we need to change in our organization and operations to implement a new business model?
• What information would we need to make a commitment to a new business model?
• How urgent is the perceived need for change in our organization?
• How should our ideas be championed?

Source: Business Model Innovation: When the Game Gets Tough, Change the Game by Zhenya Lindgardt, Martin Reeves, George Stalk, and Michael S. Deimler | Boston Consulting Group (BCG), December 2009

• How will information technology increase transparency in the industry?
• How will transparency impact consumer behaviors, retailer strategies and producer strategies?
• How can we capture value and mitigate the challenges of transparency in terms of price, reputation and other drivers of purchase behaviors?
• How should we react to empowered stakeholders — from consumers to third parties like environmental lobbies — who can impact the reputation of the firm?

Source: The View from the Glass House by Ajit Kambil, Patrick Conroy and Ryan Alvanos | Deloitte Review, Winter 2008

Source: Questions to Ask When Leading Change to Get More Engagement by Melissa Dutmers | Riverfork Consulting

1. We make it easy for prospective customers to find us and understand our products and services.
2. We have the capability to offer expertise, tools, and other assistance to help customers determine their criteria for a good solution and which solutions best fit their situation.
3. We offer various approaches for customers to acquire our products and services, such as different payment options, leasing, financing, etc.
4. We can and do help customers with logistics and other issues related to receiving our products and services.
5. We provide flexible options for support and assistance to customers in installing, implementing and using our products and services.
6. We have a range of options available to help customers recycle, reuse, reduce waste, upgrade, and dispose of our products at the end of a product’s useful life.

If you answered yes to all six questions, congratulations on meeting the criteria for creating a differentiated offering for your customers. You may, however, want to ask yourself whether all your salespeople are consciously applying a lifecycle strategy and are maximizing the potential for every customer.

Source: Is Your Sales Team Creating Real Differentiation? by Tom Roth | MarketingProfs.com

• What leadership competencies/attributes are required to drive our business strategy and lead the evolution of the culture? How robust is our existing leadership pipeline, and where are there risks?
• What are the pivotal job families/roles most critical to executing our business strategy? How will we differentiate talent strategies/investments accordingly?
• What are the implications for skill development, given our business strategy?
• What are our existing/emerging talent requirements in the various markets we serve, and how will we attract/deploy the right talent to these markets?
• How can we optimize investments in talent and reward programs to achieve the right performance outcomes and evolve the culture?
• Does the talent function have the right structure, capabilities and people to deliver value to the organization at the right cost?

Source: A Tipping Point for Talent Management? | Towers Perrin

• How many customers do you have? How many are repeat customers? How many have only bought once?
• How many customers have you lost in the past year?
• How many customers have you retained in the last year?
• Do you calculate the Life Time Value (LTV) for each of your customers? Do you calculate profitability for each of your customers? If so, do you then grade them according to their value in the company, with the intention of moving customers up on the continuum? Do you know who your most profitable customers are? And why they are profitable?
• How many customers have you upgraded in the past year (cross-sell, upsell or moved into a new category)? Many companies ‘grade’ customers; customers with the highest LTV are ‘A’ customers, ones with the next highest LTV are ‘B’ customers and so on. Ideally the object should be to move Cs to B status, Bs to an A and so on.
• How much of your customers’ ’share of wallet’ do you get? Do you get all the possible business you can?
• How many referrals or testimonials did customers give you last year?
• When customers leave why do they leave? (Just because they tell you it was about price doesn’t mean that’s really what it was about. Often it’s about value, but when customers don’t have a language to articulate that, it sounds like, "The price was too high.")
• How much does it cost you to get new customers? (Sales, marketing, advertising)
• How long does it take for a new customer to become profitable – or to recoup what you’ve spent to acquire them? What happens to your acquisition costs if you lose customers before that period of time? Do you know how many new customers leave before you’ve broken even on the cost of getting them? Obviously losing customers costs companies a whole lotta money – but how much? What is the cost of failure when you don’t consciously build long-term relationships with customers?
• How much does it cost to replace good customers after they’ve left?
• What is attrition costing you?
• How does the number of incoming customers compare with the number of outgoing ones? What percentage of your customer base are you actually losing on an ongoing basis? (If you’re losing 30% and replacing 30% of customers every year, that means only 40% of your customer base is stable – so how reliable and proficient can your research possibly be? Be cautious if you’re making sweeping decisions based on this small percentage of customers.)
• What are your customers’ top three (current) expectations?
• How many dollars would drop to your bottom line if you could keep only 5% of the profitable customers you currently lose?

Source: Numbers, Numbers, Numbers by JoAnna Brandi | CEO Refresher, November 2009

Source: What Determines Which Businesses Win and Which Lose? by Wayne Strom, PhD, Keith McFarland | Graziadio Business Report, Volume 12, Issue 2

• What is our mind-set about complaints?
• What do we want to accomplish with our service recovery approach?
• What experiences do we want our customers to have when they give us feedback?
• What guidelines should we follow when handling complaints?

Measure

• What are our goals and how will we know we are getting close to them?
• What do we currently do well?
• What does our staff think and feel about complaints?
• How robust are our current metrics regarding product or service failures?
• How widely is our complaint data shared internally?
• Have we benchmarked ourselves against our competitors?
• Would it be useful for us to use a robust customer relationship management (CRM) program to track our complaints?

Align

• Do our written responses to complaints reflect our service recovery approach?
• Does our reward system compensate for effective complaint handling?
• Are our return policies, refunds, and guarantees in alignment with our customer philosophy?
• Are our internal policies, procedures, and systems in alignment with our feedback philosophy?

Respond and Recover

• Does our staff respond to complaining customers as if they have been given a gift?
• How empowered is our staff to respond to complaints?
• How do we handle conflicts between our staff and our customers?
• Does everyone, in some way, take responsibility for responding and recovering for our customers?

Integrate

• How do we apply what we learn from our customers to help improve our quality?
• What is our process enabling staff to learn from each other about effective complaint handling?
• What is our system for sharing information across departments?
• How do we ensure that the topic of "feedback" is on everyone’s agenda?
• How can we use our service recovery approach in our marketing?

Source: Believe It: Complaints Are Gifts by Janelle Barlow, PhD | Graziadio Business Report, Volume 12, Issue 1