Awkward Reality #430

Finance for B2B Innovation: 5 Growth Stalling Sins

NPV for Innovation

Finance is the calculus of growth. Engineers, product managers, and CEOs are all guided by financial metrics to lead the business to fulfill its purpose: sustainable, profitable growth. Meanwhile, the outside world uses finance to estimate firm value and potential. Perhaps due to the breadth of stakeholders, it’s easy for a company to slip into ... Read More

Avoid the 4 Traps of Predicting Technology Adoption

Avoid the 4 traps of technology prediction using jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) thinking that is informed by the voice of the customer. Image of a large door open to the future.

It’s natural to ruminate on the future; in particular, about technology adoption. What changes will future technology waves bring?  Will we ride them to riches or drown under the weight of disruption? A Danish proverb warns that “Prediction is dangerous, especially about the future.” A cycle of bad logic Unfortunately, when we theorize, we can ... Read More

Awkward Reality #429

What’s ‘filtering out’ customer needs, so that your R&D misses them?

429-Filter customer visits

Every one of your B2B customers has needs… problems to be solved. What’s filtering them out, preventing your solution providers from understanding them? 1) Poor listening skills when your employees meet with them? 2) Few probing questions? 3) Haphazard call reports? 4) Weak CRM datamining? You can change all this when your customer-facing employees use Everyday VOC.

More in Everyday VOC white paper, www.EVOCpaper.com

The Missing Objective in Voice of Customer Interviews

B2B Value Propositions - voice of customer interviews - 10-Pricing-Window

Your “second objective” after customer insight should be customer engagement. These 9 approaches help: 1) Kill the questionnaire, 2) let customers lead, 3) discuss their “job-to-be-done,” 4) project your notes, 5) focus on customer outcomes, 6) probe… deeply, 7) don’t sell or solve, 8) get quantitative, and 9) use triggers. ... Read More

Smarketing is not so Smart

Steering for organic growth

What is Smarketing? “Smarketing” is when marketing is only executed with a short-term, sales mentality. It’s the unholy melding of sales and marketing. Why is this bad? With Smarketing, the longer-term, less urgent, strategic marketing activities are pushed aside. It’s what remains when strategic marketing is absent. Strategy begins with segmentation. Click here to read ... Read More

When is outsourcing a good option for VOC?

outsourcing voc

For new product success, it’s critical to continuously understand customer needs. There’s only one true path to do this well: Your company must develop the competency to interview customers, to gather and prioritize needs. But additionally, are there times when the best decision is outsourcing VOC projects? Yes, there will be. But first, let’s review ... Read More

Awkward Reality #428

Doing quantitative voice-of-customer? Good. Now do it “the B2B way.”

428-Business-to-Business

Clever companies realize they’ll “hear what they want to hear” without quantitative VOC. To do it right, B2B companies should weight responses based on customer buying power. And don’t just ask for importance ratings: Ask for satisfaction ratings as well. The only hope for premium pricing is pursuing needs that are both important and unsatisfied. You can use something called Market Satisfaction Gaps to point you in the right direction.

More in white paper, www.marketsatisfactiongaps.com

Awkward Reality #427

Letting an executive focus on maximized shareholder value can have dangerous consequences.

427-Shareholder-Value

If a stock’s P/E ratio is 20-to-1, then only 5 percent of a firm’s value is driven by this year’s earnings. Put another way, 95 percent of shareholder value is driven by investors’ expectations of the future. Executives with rich stock options have “motive and opportunity” to manipulate these expectations… in ways that often damage the firm’s long-term health.

More in 2-minute video, 5. Shareholder wealth is a poor goal