B2B Organic Growth Blog

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

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

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

It's much easier to gather the data you need for pricing a new product, because customers want you to understand enough to deliver value to them. Unlike B2C, B2B providers should try to understand customers’ pricing decision-making instead of asking for pricing decisions (via surveys). ... Read More

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

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