B2B Organic Growth Blog

Avoid these 7 mistakes in developing new products: 1) Imagining customer needs. 2) Relying on sales reps to capture customer needs. 3) Counting on just a few VOC experts. 4) Using hand-me-down consumer-goods methods. 5) Gathering only qualitative customer feedback. 6) Listening only to immediate customers. 7) Ignoring competitors when you design your product. ... Read More

No one likes to be average—another word for mediocre—in something as important as growing their business. Of course, half of all businesses are below average in any given year. And few in the above-average ranks for B2B growth are confident they can stay there year after year. This can change for your business. You can ... Read More

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)

Portfolio management links strategy with execution for new product development. A Voice of the Customer program maximizes ROI for all new product initiatives, whether incremental or breakthrough. ... Read More

Has your business correctly answered 4 questions? 1) Would better customer insight improve our innovation success? 2) Should we take a DIY approach to customer insight (vs. using “hired guns”)? 3) Should we learn improved customer insight from external trainers (vs. training ourselves)? 4) Should gaining this customer insight capability be a top priority (vs. other priorities)? ... Read More

Use these 5 tactics to improve your solution brainstorming: 1) Begin with a problem to be solved. 2) Embrace two distinct phases of divergence and convergence. 3) Schedule for adequate time. 4) Choose a diverse team. 5) Conduct pre-session training. Then move on to 5 “advanced” tactics. ... Read More

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

Don't overlook these 5 hidden risks when you develop new products for B2B markets: 1) customer detachment, 2) narrow targets, 3) internal bias, 4) competitive blind spots, and 5) low findability. ... Read More

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

New Product Blueprinting provides these typically overlooked benefits: 1) Learn the unknown unknowns. 2) Unlearn the things we do know… that aren’t true. 3) Align the development team for action. 4) Make better decisions through market intuition. 5) Build sales relationships. ... Read More