B2B Customer Interviews: Are They Different?

When I ask industrial producers if they conduct B2B customer interviews during new product development, I generally get one of two responses: 1) No, but we should. 2) Yes, we use a voice-of-the-customer (VOC) approach, such as Quality Function Deployment or Design for Six Sigma. In this briefing, we’ll think through the second response.If you are using the same one-size-fits-all VOC interviews for industrial goods that others use for consumer goods, you’re sub-optimizing. Business to-business (B2B) producers have huge advantages over consumer goods producers, but they may not be immediately obvious. After all, didn’t the fellow who bought a rail car of soda ash on Friday also buy a can of soda pop on Saturday?

Click here to learn about the significant differences between B2B and B2C.

Nope. He changed… a lot. Compared to retail consumers, industrial customers are more technically savvy, more rational in their decisions, more dependent on suppliers, fewer in number and more diverse in their applications for any one product. Careful reflection of these customer differences should lead you to three goals in the front-end of your B2B new product development (NPD). These, in turn, will lead you to different approaches than you are likely using today (see Figure 1).

Three B2B Front-End Goals

First, collaborate deeply. Expect more out of your B2B customer interviews with a hydraulic hose buyer than with a garden hose buyer. You can have an intelligent, peer-to-peer conversation about pressure ratings, fluid specifications, etc. And expect greater interest, since your innovations can help the hydraulics engineer become a hero with his next new product. Without innovative suppliers, his path to acclaim and personal satisfaction is a difficult one.

Second, “pre-sell” your product. Nothing makes someone want to buy a product as much as helping to design it. @aim_institute Here’s where the smaller number of industrial customers works to your advantage. You can’t engage a million toothpaste consumers, but what could you do with your ten largest print paste customers? I’ve found this “engagement” to be a great benefit which—as we’ll see—is under-exploited with traditional VOC methods.

Finally, maximize your “value capture.” Consumers generally use food coloring to… well… color food. But industrial customers can use your colorants for a broad range of applications, from plastics and paints to pills. Typically, some of these applications give you excellent profit and growth prospects, while others are downright ugly. Through careful market segmentation and an intense concentration on the most attractive segments, you can amplify your earnings.

B2B Customer Interviews: 4 Approaches for Success

Collaboration, pre-selling and value capture are wonderful goals, but to reach them you’ll need new approaches. @aim_institute. Forget traditional VOC techniques such as tape-recording or observing your customers like Jane Goodall’s chimps, or getting mired in inscrutable statistical manipulations. Instead, use four approaches designed specifically for B2B front-end NPD work:

1) Use a digital projector when executing B2B customer interviews  and record the information so all can see it. Their engagement will go up by an order of magnitude. I ran into a customer a couple of years after I did one such interview and he said, “I had been interviewed by others, but with your approach, I felt like I was part of the process. And I could make sure you were getting things right because I could see what you were recording.”