Companies like to talk about the voice-of-the-customer, but most just listen to themselves as they create “conference room” products. The team gathers internally to decide for the customer what they’ll want in a new product. This team will always lose to the team that immerses itself in the customer experience, and designs a product to improve that experience.

More in 2-minute video at 22. Immerse your team in customer outcomes

Turns out that understanding market needs makes a big difference. In recent AIM Institute research, nearly 90% of survey respondents claiming a very poor understanding of market needs had new product success rates below 50%. This percentage dropped to less than 10% those for those claiming a good understanding of market needs. So understanding what customers want before you develop your new product is probably a good idea.

More in research report, www.b2bvocskills.com (page 7)

Imagine your doctor entered the exam room, saying, “I’ll ask some routine questions to validate my hunch… so I can start treatment.” Would he be your doctor for long? Wouldn’t you rather have a doctor who listens first and asks intelligent questions? Your customers feel the same way, so leave your hypothesis in the waiting room and start engaging them.

More in 2-minute video at 29. Engage your B2B customers

Do you like to answer surveys at home? How about at work? How do you think customers feel about filling in your questionnaire? Forget your list of brilliant questions. Instead, learn to brilliantly probe whatever customers want to tell you. You’ll be rewarded by customers who actually want to talk to you.

More in e-book, www.reinventingvocforb2b.com (page 2)

New Product Success is a metric for current projects. Learning Success—which measures skill-building progress—is a metric for future projects. Most companies just consider New Product Success. Worse, they only look at ultimate metrics, e.g., sales. If they also used intermediate metrics, they’d have enough time to apply what they learned from these metrics.

More in white paper, www.newinnovationmetrics.com

Analysis looks for what has been done wrong; discovery for what could be done right. Failing to discover opportunities is a costly error. Paradoxically, it is most often forgiven. In fact, if your team fails to develop a blockbuster because it missed a critical customer need, no one will even notice. At least not until a competitor does a better job. This is called an error of omission and it’s a serious problem for many B2B companies.

More in 2-minute video at 25. Let your customers surprise you

Unlike innovation, quality and productivity apply to current operations and yield diminishing returns. What do you do after you reach zero defects… or your factory is being run by the proverbial “man and a dog”? (The man feeds the dog; the dog bites the man if he touches the controls.) Customer-facing innovation is different. There is no limit. Just look at Apple Computer.

More in white paper, www.catchtheinnovationwave.com (page 2)