B2B Organic Growth Blog

If you’re mainly concerned with making the place look good quarter after quarter, you’re an Interior Decorator. Jeff Bezos was a Builder… running Amazon for seven years before turning a profit. The stock market still applauded him, because he had a building plan they could believe in. As Warren Buffet said, “Companies obtain the shareholder constituency that they seek and deserve.”

More in article, How to become a great business leader

How about knowing their response before they see it? B2B customers are so knowledgeable that you can model their behavior based on what you learn in customer interviews. Prototypes are still worthwhile—for refinement and engagement. But they’re far too expensive and time-consuming if you do them before conducting insightful B2B customer interviews.

More in article, How to model customer needs 

Years of research by Booz Allen Hamilton have shown no correlation between how much you spend on R&D and how well you perform over the long term. A better strategy? Understand what customers want… so your R&D doesn’t develop great cures for no known diseases.

More in article, The Inputs to Innovation for B2B

In a whispered voice, a B2B business executive confided to me that his company seldom spent more than $10k on their product launches… even after spending hundreds of thousands developing the product. This isn’t launching a product. This is kicking it off the loading dock and hoping someone finds it.

More in article, Stop Squandering Your Product Launch Budget

Is your business descending the 9 steps of the commodity death spiral right now? Do you see yourself in a specialty vs. commodity tug-of-war? Five commodity-pulling forces are arrayed against you. Specialty-pulling forces must come from one place—you, the supplier—or they won’t come at all.

More in article, The Commodity Death Spiral

You can improve a process anywhere down the value chain, or you can improve the ultimate product. (Mid-stream products don’t count.) Equipment and service providers often have their biggest impact on processes. Component or material makers often have a larger impact on products. In either case, you need to pursue these improvements with passion.

More in e-book, Reinventing VOC for B2B (page 26).

In Level 1, you start with your ideas and launch products you think customers will want. In Level 2, you still start with your ideas, but “validate” them with customers. In Level 3, you start with customer needs, using divergent and convergent interviews. You uncover a full range of outcomes and only work on those customers care about.

More in white paper, Guessing at Customer Needs (page 7).

If you focus on unimportant outcomes, customers will greet your new product with a collective yawn. If you satisfy outcomes competitors already meet, customers will greet you with a phone call requesting lower prices. How long will this take them? Depends if they have you on speed dial.

More in article, Your Best Path to Profitable, Sustainable Organic Growth

You want to get the right B2B interviewees in the room, but setting up great interviews can be tough. Interviewees may think… “I’m too busy… I don’t want to discuss confidential information… I can’t be bothered by a boring survey… I’ll bet they just want to sell me something.” Knowing how to overcome objections is as important a competitive edge as the interviewing skills themselves.

More in article, 9 Best Practices for Recruiting Customers

When you launch a product, do customers instantly begin buying? Or do they need months of deliberation? Start them deliberating well before your launch with engaging interviews and follow-up. Customers will help you make course corrections for a better new product… and when you’re ready to sell, they’ll be ready to buy much faster.

More in article, The Missing Objective in B2B VOC