As an organizational leader, you’ll be very familiar with your company’s key financial statements and monthly management reports. But what do you really know about the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity (Wharton School Press, 2022), experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really understanding your customers’ buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base.

In this excerpt from their book, the authors ask some challenging questions and make the argument that to answer them, you’ll need to conduct your own customer-base audit.

As a senior executive, you have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures. Focusing on the top line of the income statement, you’ll probably have looked at sales by product line and geography. Quite possibly you have looked at product profitability as part of a product line rationalization exercise.

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