B2B Organic Growth Blog

Think your VOC work is done if you can splash some pithy customer quotes on a PowerPoint slide? Nope. You must conduct quantitative interviews to isolate the important, unsatisfied outcomes (using 1-10 scales). We all “hear what we want to hear”… so unfiltered customer data is needed. Never spend development dollars until someone “shows you the numbers.” The most important numbers are something called Market Satisfaction Gaps.

More white paper, www.marketsatisfactiongaps.com

Can Voice of the Customer methods be helpful for Sales? Consider the purpose of VOC – to understand customer needs for innovation.  Could it be possible that these innovation methods could help sales as well?  Let’s look at 11 VOC principles that will improve sales effectiveness. 1. Talk first; listen later. In today’s fast-paced world, ... Read More

Mediocre product teams ask the question, “How do we improve our product?” Good teams ask, “For what job does a customer hire our product?” But the elite teams additionally ask, “Who are we creating value for?” And to arrive at a proper answer, we must understand customer roles for JTBD (jobs-to-be-done). What are the Roles ... Read More

If your new product development process begins with “idea generation,” is it your idea… or your customers’? If you start with your idea, you probably won’t understand customer needs until the end… by seeing if they buy your new product. Why not flip your approach and start with customer needs? Unless you’d rather your R&D kept guessing at customer needs.

More in white paper, www.guessingatcustomerneeds.com

A persona is a hypothetical archetype used to represent customers in a given market segment. Follow 4 practices for B2B growth: 1) Design for just one person, 2) be specific, 3) remember precision is more important than accuracy, and 4) separate user personas from buyer personas. ... Read More

“Jobs-to-be-done” (JTBD) is a powerful way of thinking that 1) provides a longer time horizon than a product focus, 2) guides you when conducting pre-interview market research, 3) naturally integrates with New Product Blueprinting, and 4) helps you separate the core, focal job from consumption chain jobs. ... Read More

Traditional VOC relies on questionnaires, tape recorders and post-interview analyses. That’s fine for B2C, but your B2B customers are insightful, rational, interested and fewer in number. They’re smart and will make you smarter if you engage them in a peer-to-peer fashion, take notes with a digital projector, skillfully probe, and let them lead you.

More in 2-minute video at 14. Understand your B2B advantages

Survey data shows three benefits of using The AIM Institute's Discovery interviews: 1) Gain insight into customer needs, 2) engage and impress customers, and 3) develop life-long skills. ... Read More

Within every new product initiative, we must create a product spec.  As a result, engineers need to know what to “build to.” Meanwhile, modern innovation methods begin with customer needs as the input to the process, leaving an important, and too-often unanswered question, “How do we get from a customer need to a product specification?” ... Read More

Are you launching one breakthrough new product after another? Or are your new products evoking yawns from customers? Research shows the most likely reason for the latter is failing to properly 1) uncover, 2) understand, and 3) prioritize market needs. Here’s how to correct this in your B2B new product development. We shouldn’t be surprised ... Read More