AIM Archives - Tag: customer

B2B customers can tell you exactly what they want… but you must know how to ask.

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Imagine you’re planning to build a new home: Your architect sees you for half an hour, spends the first 15 minutes talking about sports, and then shows you pictures of other houses he designed. Later, when the house fails to please you, he dismisses it saying, “Well that buyer just didn’t know what he wanted.” Ever treat customers this way?

More in white paper, Guessing at Customer Needs

Pursuing the right customer needs requires divergent and convergent thinking… in that order.

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For every job a customer does, there are dozens of potential outcomes… so diverge with customers to uncover far more than competitors. Then ask for 1-10 importance and satisfaction ratings so your R&D can converge on the important, unsatisfied outcomes… while competitors guess. I’d like to make this sound more complicated, but it’s not.

More in white paper, Market Satisfaction Gaps

The best value propositions aren’t created by suppliers… they’re discovered.

Surprised Boy Makes Money with Idea Helmet

Ever watch stage-gate reviews or entire workshops wrestling with The Value Proposition? It’s not pretty. In my experience, good B2B customer interviews yield potential value propositions like so many ripe apples falling from a tree. You just need to pick which to pursue. If you need to dream up value propositions, you’re climbing the wrong tree.

More in white paper, Guessing at Customer Needs

Validating hypotheses with customers distorts your entire new product development process.

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Confirmation bias is the “tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, regardless of whether the information is true.” It’s what happens when you take your lovely new-product hypotheses to customers. This systematically distorts data on customer needs… and that can’t be good for innovation, right?

More in 2-minute video at 35. Insist on data-driven innovation

Don’t rely on a small staff of voice-of-customer experts to do your company’s interviewing.

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Large businesses chalk up thousands of face-to-face customer meetings each year… as sales and technical service reps go about their normal duties. Why not train these people to become VOC experts? They’ve already gained customers’ trust, they know the customer’s language, they’ll get key information first-hand, and there’s no extra travel cost.

More in white paper, Everyday VOC

In one study, 76% said their interviews led to unexpected or surprising information.

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And that’s the point, isn’t it? If we just try to develop the products our customers ask everyone for, and we haven’t cornered the market on R&D genius, we’ll keep struggling with differentiation. But if we intentionally expose ourselves to unexpected information—that our competitors lack—we’ll create more significant, protectable value.

More in 2-minute video at 25. Let your customers surprise you

The best way to hear (the customer) is often to see.

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One of our best innovations started as an experiment. In 2004 I projected my notes during a customer interview. The customer loved it, the meeting went far longer than expected, and we haven’t looked back since. Sure, customers can correct your notes this way, but our biggest discovery was that customers own what they create and can see. We’ve been calling these “Discovery” interviews ever since.

More in video, Reinventing VOC for B2B

Why take a “leap of faith” when you could take a leap of confidence—more quickly and cheaply?

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Lean Startup methodology refers to “Leap of Faith Assumptions,” and recommends testing assumptions with customers at the first opportunity. For B2B, this “first opportunity” to learn comes before a prototype is created… through VOC interviews to mine the foresight of knowledgeable customers. Don’t miss this B2B adjustment to Lean Startup.

More in white paper, Lean Startup for B2B (page 6)

Got cool technology? Great. Just test it silently with customers.

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Avoid “technology push.” But should you just leave your technology quivering on the lab bench? Hardly. Conduct customer interviews without mentioning your technology. If customer outcomes match your technology… wonderful! Otherwise, look for different technology (for this market), or look for another market (for this technology).

More in 2-minute video at 21. Give your hypotheses the silent treatment