B2B Organic Growth Blog

Ever watch stage-gate reviews or entire workshops wrestling with The Value Proposition? It’s not pretty. In my experience, good B2B customer interviews yield potential value propositions like so many ripe apples falling from a tree. You just need to pick which to pursue. If you need to dream up value propositions, you’re climbing the wrong tree.

More in white paper, Guessing at Customer Needs

Does your operating plan call for profitable growth in 2025? How will you achieve it? You could use your old playbook… or employ AI, arguably the biggest game-changer in decades. Let’s look at four ways to use AI for growth-driving competitive advantage. You can use AI to boost efficiency or effectiveness. Said another way, you ... Read More

Instead, ask the right questions about your customer’s problems. The consultative selling movement was given a major boost in 1988 with Neil Rackham’s ground-breaking research in SPIN Selling. By observing more than 35,000 sales calls, they established that the most successful salespeople ask great questions. Decades later, we had our own question: Are some questions more likely to drive sales? (The answer is “yes”!) We surveyed 396 B2B sales professionals with over 6,000 years of combined experience concerning 12 voice-of-customer skills.

Download AIM Institute research report, VOC Skills that Drive B2B Sales

Confirmation bias is the “tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, regardless of whether the information is true.” It’s what happens when you take your lovely new-product hypotheses to customers. This systematically distorts data on customer needs… and that can’t be good for innovation, right?

More in 2-minute video at 35. Insist on data-driven innovation

Ultimately, everything your business does should be about efficiently delivering value to customers. If you don’t focus on clusters of like-minded customers, their needs will be randomly observed by different people in your company at different times under different conditions. Not an efficient way to develop new products—your lifeblood.

More in 2-minute video at 16. Segment by markets for innovation

According to the authors of The Challenger Customer, “The limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is.” To overcome this, try Key Account Blueprinting… New Product Blueprinting applied to one large account at a time. This forces stakeholder agreement.

More in white paper, Key Account Blueprinting

When you finish the front-end of innovation, you may have plenty of technical risk ahead. But you can examine B2B customer outcomes at nine levels, and gain an incredible understanding of the customer’s world. Done well, your commercial risk should be negligible when you enter the development stage.

More in white paper, Timing is Everything (page 6)

Large businesses chalk up thousands of face-to-face customer meetings each year… as sales and technical service reps go about their normal duties. Why not train these people to become VOC experts? They’ve already gained customers’ trust, they know the customer’s language, they’ll get key information first-hand, and there’s no extra travel cost.

More in white paper, Everyday VOC

Take the position that you are the CEO of the product. You are responsible for everything: profits, inventories, happy customers, successful product launches, focused engineers, etc. In other words, everything. Take on personal ownership for the success of your products. This is an important mindset because, as a product manager, you will interact with every ... Read More

If you’re dragging in your list of questions and the customer feels they’re doing you a favor… it’s supplier-led. But if you keep the scope broad enough to interest them, let them lead you to what interests them, and help them think deeply through attentive probing… it’s customer-led. It’s also much more effective.

See demo video at Reinventing VOC for B2B