Neither will customers pay you for a product they don’t need. I call this new-product failure mode, “Nice shot, wrong target.” It is far too common. Most customers really do have something “broken” that needs fixed. Figure out what this is before you design your next new product, and they’ll pay you handsomely.

More in white paper, Guessing at Customer Needs

Some products deliver enormous profits for decades, carrying whole businesses and careers on their sturdy shoulders. And then there are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of wretched new products you wish were on your competitors’ teeming shores. The most popular way to fail is guessing at customer needs.

More in white paper, Guessing at Customer Needs

One is throwing more money at R&D in a Soviet-style arms race. Another is exhorting the troops to do better. An all-time favorite is asking tough project-review questions… but not training teams in the skills needed to find the answers. What if all your teams had the highest possible skills in understanding customer needs? Might this work better?

More in e-book, Reinventing VOC for B2B

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

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