B2B Voice of Customer Training
Since 2005, New Product Blueprinting interviews have evolved until they now only faintly resemble traditional VOC. Why? Because they’ve been refined and field-tested in tens of thousands of B2B-only customer interviews. (See our clients’ case stories.) If you want better customer insight, get the world’s leading B2B voice of customer training as delivered through our workshops, not hand-me-down consumer-goods VOC methods. With our B2B VOC training, you’ll be amazed at how much you can learn from insightful, objective, interested B2B customers.
Voice of the Customer Training: The B2B-Focused Workshop
B2B marketing, product management, and leaders are asked to deliver both short term growth while building for the future. In our workshops, learners will not only learn B2B-optimized methods for uncovering customer insight, but they’ll also learn how to build engagement with customers in the process.
“High engagement” means that customers will be part of the process. The qualitative interviews will feel like energizing brainstorming sessions. The quantitative portion will go deeper, allowing the customer to indicate which needs are the most important and unsatisfied. When the time comes to release a new product, customers will be eager to buy, since they were involved.
Key Elements of New Product Blueprinting
1. Digital projection
You’ll use a digital projector or web-conference to capture customers’ ideas. This completely changes the interview dynamics, since customers don’t have to guess what you’re scribbling or typing. Blueprinter® software lets you record and sort their comments on digital “sticky notes”… creating a shared “idea-generation” atmosphere. Plus, you can use the search function to find themes across projects. This also allows for real-time corrections and greatly impresses customers. These interviews set you apart in customers’ eyes long before your new product arrives.
2. No questionnaires
Most voice of customer training encourages you to develop brilliant questions in an interview script. Instead, we teach you how to brilliantly probe any customer responses. You ask a few simple questions and then follow customers’ lead… as they direct you to the areas they are most concerned with. Customers feel you are really listening to them… not just filling in your questionnaire. Customers say they find this refreshing.
3. No selling, no solving
Your commercial people have been trained to sell and your technical people to solve. But in Blueprinting interviews, they just search. They use highly-refined probing techniques to uncover market needs your competitors completely miss. Blueprinting is very intentional about staying clear of solving (which wastes time and jeopardizes your intellectual property) and selling (which wastes time and makes you appear self-serving).
4. Voice of Customer Training Focus: Put needs before supplier solutions
Many companies say they want to understand market needs… when they really just want to “validate” solutions developed in their labs and conference rooms. If your new product development process begins with an “idea,” it’s usually your idea, not your customers’, right? No wonder most new products fail! Blueprinting inverts this process, so you start with market needs and then look inside and outside your company for the best solution.
5. Time-efficient
Traditional voice of customer training often calls for hours of transcribing, interpretation and analysis. Your B2B customers are capable—and usually eager—to help you understand and prioritize their needs while still in the room with you. And unlike B2C techniques, where they feel studied and observed, this interaction is a respectful discussion between professional peers. Your interview team has a short post-interview debriefing… and they’re done.
6. Market-driven data
When you conduct Preference Interviews in a second round of customer visits, Blueprinter® software generates Market Satisfaction Gaps (MSG). Customer outcomes with MSG over 30% indicate the customer is eager for change. In some cases, you’ll learn customers are already satisfied: So instead of developing a product for this market, you’ll drop the project… and celebrate! This is how companies stop squandering scarce R&D and marketing resources. (See over a dozen case stories.)
7. Key B2B Difference: Innovating down the value chain
Unlike B2C producers, your product might be part of your customer’s customer’s product, or even further down the value chain. Our voice of customer training gives you advanced techniques to help you go down this value chain to understand all relevant needs. And while B2C producers assign “one vote” per consumer… you’ll assign weights for the buying power of B2B customers. Our Voice of the Customer workshops show you how to do this with simple but powerful quantitative tools.
8. Superior value propositions
Blueprinter software helps you set product objectives based on data from interviews and competitive testing. Visual tools let you view “what-if” product designs, predict market reaction to each, and select the best. Resulting value propositions—void of wishful thinking and internal bias—are captured in a 12-point venture-capital-quality Business Case. You can use this as a stand-alone justification or as a supplement to your existing stage-and-gate process.
9. Building corporate memory
Instead of using many unconnected tools, you’ll capture the entire front-end of product development in Blueprinter software. Your teams will have a natural “roadmap” to follow, so the best market insight practices become second-nature throughout your company. And years from now, others in your company can search cloud-based Blueprinter software for critical market needs. Most companies “don’t know what they know”… but your company will!
10. Voice of the Customer Training for the B2B Pro
Don’t rely on a handful of internal experts for hearing your customers’ “voice.” With our proven Voice of the Customer workshops, your marketing, technical and sales people—who are constantly visiting customers anyway—will uncover customer needs day in and day out. Don’t outsource this work to VOC “hired guns.” This is a strong competitive advantage in B2B that you need to own.
Learn More about our Voice of the Customer Method, New Product Blueprinting
Guessing at Customer Needs: Download this white paper and see why 5 out of 6 teams significantly change their product designs… after they conduct Blueprinting interviews.
Reinventing VOC for B2B: Learn the new rules for B2B-optimized voice of customer (VOC) in this e-book by Dan Adams.
Learn more about our B2B Voice of the Customer Training and Workshops
Voice of the Customer workshops are delivered in both virtual and in-person sessions. These are more than just Voice of the Customer training. It includes access to over 20 BlueTools aids, the BlueHelp knowledge center, Blueprinter software and more. There are options available for either just a team or for an entire company. Learn what’s included with the workshops.