All growth-oriented innovation starts with customer outcomes. This is what customers want to have happen, with no understanding yet of how it will happen. Nothing a company does can achieve profitable, sustainable growth unless customer value is created… which comes only by improving these outcomes. Want to improve your new product success? Understand your customers’ outcomes in incredible detail.
More in 2-minute video at 22. Immerse your team in customer outcomes
Picture this: A customer tells your sales rep what they want, who hands it off to your R&D. This clever customer tells your competitors the same thing. Terrific. If more than one supplier crosses the finish line, you can forget any price premium. Try this: You choose the race conditions by targeting an attractive market, and exploring its needs better than competitors. This is one reason why market-facing innovation is superior to customer reactive innovation.
More in 2-minute video at 16. Segment by markets for innovation
Key account management is important to your company. But are you doing it any better than your competitors? You can with Key Account Blueprinting. When you apply traditional New Product Blueprinting to a “market of one,” you’ll lock in that key account, expand your business with them, and learn how to increase your prices. Here’s ... Read More
It’s risky to incrementalize… but “great hope” projects often absorb huge resources and end with a whimper. What’s the answer? Get out more. Spend more time in customers’ worlds to reduce commercial risk. And reduce technical risk through open innovation, tapping into external technologies. You can’t thrive today without external insight. (Hmmm… “exsight”?)
More in 2-minute video at 42. Beware of New Product Incrementalism
Your company’s only path to profitable, sustainable, organic growth is understanding and improving customers’ important, unmet outcomes. Today this “understanding” is your best competitive advantage, simply because most B2B suppliers have far less customer insight than they could.
More in 2-minute video at 8. Rethink your major initiatives
If you’re asked to cross an unfamiliar chasm, would it be risky? Hard to say. Until you learn if you’ll face a bridge or a tightrope, you can’t assess risk (probability). You’re just uncertain. Many companies fear risk in an unfamiliar market, when they should map out a plan to reduce uncertainty. This is especially easy to do in B2B markets.
More in white paper, www.UnfamiliarMarkets.com (page 2)