In the landmark book, SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham’s research on 35,000 sales visits found the best salespeople engage customers in discussions about their problems. Consider your own stage-and-gate process: After Concept Development, Feasibility, Development, and Scale-up, your best salespeople ask customers, “What problems are you facing?” Why not pull this question to the front end and ask it before developing your product? This engages customers in a genuine manner and starts the “selling process” before you have something to sell. See video at www.vocforb2b.com.
More in article, The Missing Objective in Voice of Customer Interviews
It’s pretty obvious that one objective is customer insight—understanding customer needs so you can develop the right product. The oft-overlooked objective is customer engagement. This is conducting your voice of customer interviews in a manner that “primes” customers to buy your product when you’re done developing it. Do this well and you sell your product before it even exists. Learn more about customer engagement in the 2-minute video, Engage your B2B customers.
More in article, The Missing Objective in Voice of Customer Interviews
First, ask what “job-to-be-done” you want to help customers improve. Then ask who these customers are. There’s more to the second question than many realize: a) Which point of the value chain is key? Our customers? Our customers’ customers? b) Which job functions should we interview at these companies? c) Who else in the ecosystem should we interview? Industry influencers? Co-suppliers? Regulators? The more diverse your input, the more likely you are to uncover an exciting market need your competitors missed.
More in article, Elevate Your Success in New Product Blueprinting Step 1
If your new product eventually reaches sales of $5 million/yr with average profits, accelerating its launch by one month boosts NPV by $80,000. Speed matters! Virtual voice-of-customer helps you move faster for 2 reasons. 1) Instead of finding 1-2 travel days for your team that align with the customer’s schedule, you just need 1-2 hours… letting you pack in more interviews earlier. 2) You can schedule multiple interviews per day. Employing more virtual VOC can easily trim a month or two off your timeline. See 2-minute video, Conduct virtual customer interviews.
Download our white paper at www.virtualvoc.com
How do you know if you’re accepting too much commercial risk in your new product development? You know if Joe answers, “Not sure. Guess we’ll find out next month when we launch it.” Future B2B innovators will think this is nuts. When you innovate for a B2B market, nearly everything needed to eliminate commercial risk is “knowable” in the front end of innovation, before development begins. That’s because your B2B customers have high knowledge, objectivity, interest and foresight (as explained in 2-minute video, Understand your B2B advantage.).
More in article, Target Customer Needs and Win
If you conduct the right kind of B2B quantitative interviews, you don’t need to show customers a prototype to see if they’ll like it. You’ll already know what they want if you use the methods in this 2-minute video: Benchmark Competing Alternatives. However… prototypes can still be helpful to a) further engage customers, b) understand the value your new product delivers, and c) make refinements. But if you’re serving a B2B market, you can stop lobbing prototypes to understand what customers want.
More in article, Predict the customer’s experience with modeling
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.You’ve covered a lot in 50 video chapters: Where do you start? This video covers 3 suggested steps on a roadmap to greater growth (and also covered in “Organic Growth Roadmap”).
b2bgrowth.video/50 Video length [2:28]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.The Vitality Index (% of sales from new products) is a helpful, but lagging indicator. Here are two new leading metrics: Growth Driver Index (GDI) and Commercial Confidence Index (CCI).
b2bgrowth.video/49 Video length [2:57]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.If your sales force was also a “learning force,” you would have an “early-warning system” to focus your R&D on market needs before competitors. We call this “market scouting.”
b2bgrowth.video/47 Video length [2:13]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.It’s more important than ever to study your business’s future: Change can be swift and punishing. Download 16 future trends sheets to help your team see “what could be.”
b2bgrowth.video/46 Video length [2:17]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.You’ll have better project reviews when management sees you’ve 1) generated assumptions, 2) rated them for impact & certainty, and 3) diligently investigated the critical ones.
b2bgrowth.video/45 Video length [2:43]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.In a post-mortem, the landmine that blew up your project is obvious. Here’s how to detect and defuse potential landmines in “pre-mortems”… when you can do something about them.
b2bgrowth.video/44 Video length [2:19]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.Many companies err by assigning risk levels, probabilities, and rates of return in the early phase of transformational projects. Focus on uncertainty—not risk—for better results.
b2bgrowth.video/43 Video length [2:47]
Subscribe to the series. Get 50 free videos, sent daily or weekly.It may seem safe to only work on “me-too” and incremental new products. But it’s not. Adams’ Risk Paradox is, “A business built on low risk is at great risk.”
b2bgrowth.video/42 Video length [2:20]
