Whether you developed your product with a specific customer need in mind, or happened upon a product and want to sell it to someone, you have to start by knowing your customer. Before the Internet boom, I assembled a group of friends and raised angel capital to start a company to develop a commodity chemical trading system, based on the notion that a hundred pounds of a specific chemical powder was the same as any other hundred pounds of the same chemical powder. It would be a trading system for chemicals – a brilliant idea – or so it seemed.
Sometimes, the development of a new product doesn’t start with a specific problem.
So I called and left voicemails – even sent faxes – urgently communicating, “let us help you figure out how our services can work for you. We can make this work.”
I had a week left before the renewal deadline. I called early mornings and late nights in hopes that I would get Lisa on the line. One early morning, a day before the due date, she finally picks up. “Is this about the renewal?” she asks nonchalantly. “What do we need to do for it?”
Jane was the director of Knowledge Management at one of the major international consulting firms. She owned the budget for all of the firm’s market research activities, including contracts with Gartner, Forrester, Yankee Group and the like. What set our research company apart was our openness – we made our analysts easily accessible to our clients, in contrast to many of our competitors. We didn’t hide them behind an 800 number and a call screener and this differentiated us in the marketplace.
Don’t forget that at the heart of every business – every organization – you will find… people and relationships. My favorite client also became one of my best friends. Tony was a Brooklyn-raised child of the Depression. He was an early IT professional – the kind that could talk about having programmed in IBM 1401 Autocoder[i] language in the early sixties.
You might want to look at the point in your launch cycle in which your company actually asks customers their opinion. For example, a few years ago, BusinessWeek cited Xerox as typically developing products fully and then asking customers what they thought. Xerox has since refocused on customers from the onset in their product development timeline. Stephen Hoover, vice-president of Xerox’s research and development hub commented, “The team had had a certain idea of what customers wanted. Going out and actually talking to them really changed that.”
Understand Your Target Market and size up the “universe” in which you’ve chosen to compete. The market forces behind big ticket, complex sales differ significantly from those of small-ticket or consumer-based sales. An understanding of your marketplace must go beyond the simple and take into account not only competitors but alternatives. You must also grasp the market forces (see note below) driving the marketplace “universe” your company competes in, as well.
