Why is it that big companies tend to keep their customers at arm’s length? Instead of taking suggestions, a lot of times companies get cocky and decide what their customers want instead of asking what their customers want. This can create major problems, as we’ve seen before.

On the other hand, there are some companies making great strides to not only connect with their customers, but to involve their customers.

One perfect example of this is My Starbucks Idea, an online forum where Starbucks customers can suggest ways to improve their “Starbucks experience,” as the company likes to say. Starbucks then lists all the ideas that come from their customers. Even if you don’t submit an idea, you have the sense that Starbucks cares.

The same goes for Keurig. Here is another company that is catering to the customer, with great results. Last week, I talked about the I³ qualities apparent in Keurig’s single-cup brewer. Since this company is an intriguing case (and since not much has been written up about them yet on the blogosphere), I wanted to spend one more week looking at Keurig’s next innovation – or, I should say, innovations – keeping in mind that all of these innovations came from customer suggestions.

• Larger Brewer: One of Keurig’s weaknesses is size. Currently, you can only brew, at most, 12 oz. at a time. For someone who tends to order “Venti” sizes, or for someone who merely wants to fill their travel mug with one K-cup, this is a problem. Not to worry, says Keurig, who is rumored to be working on a brewer to accommodate.
   
• Strong Alliances: Keurig recently announced a partnership with Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. This is a win/win for Keurig as well as for these companies – customers who only drink DD/Starbucks coffee can now enjoy it in K-cup form, thereby increasing business for both parties. In fact, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz revealed that “more than 80 percent of current Starbucks customers in the U.S. do not yet own a single-cup brewer,” so this allegiance is bound to bring strong business to Keurig (as well as make Starbucks customers very happy).
   
• Environmentally-Friendly: In my last post, I brought up the troubling thought about the amount of waste generated, throwing out all those K-cups. What you may not know is that Keurig has already come up with a solution. They’ve introduced a product called My K-Cup – letting people reuse a single pod with the coffee of their choice – which especially makes their greener customers happy.
   
• Other Instant Beverage Ideas: Keurig has already branched out into the hot chocolate and hot apple cider realm, so what’s next on the docket? Here’s just a few for starters: lattes, cappuccinos, soup, Airborne, and yes, even infant formula. It’s as if the list keeps going. Soon the question will no longer be:
  “WHAT can I get in a K-cup?” — but — “What CAN’T I get in a K-cup?”

So what does Keurig – and all of their innovation – teach those of us who are not in the coffee business? Keurig teaches us that to truly be an I³ business, you must continue to go full-speed-ahead into your market, while never losing focus of your customer base. Keurig and Starbucks teach us that it’s not enough to acknowledge the customer, but to involve the customer.

This seems like a no-brainer, but I’m still amazed at how many companies take their customers’ suggestions for granted. Keurig (and Starbucks, for that matter) has made it their business to give their customers what they want, and it’s paid off. Big time.

• What else do you think we can learn from this ever-growing, ever-innovating world of coffee?
• Have you seen a payoff in your company by listening to your customers’ requests?
• Have you ever been on the other side – have you suggested something to a company, to see them follow through? How did this affect your relationship to the company?
• How are you involving your customers in the trajectory of your business?

It just dawned on me the other day: the Keurig coffee system is everywhere. In my home, in my office, in my clients’ offices, at the gas station, in the convenience store, at the mall – everywhere! It seems that wherever I am, I can look up and see a Keurig single-cup brewing station beckoning me to brew a cup.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this phenomenon. Maybe you could even look up from your computer right this second to glance at a Keurig coffee maker (it wouldn’t surprise me).

But what I want to know is: When did all this happen? When did a seemingly niche-market coffee maker become ubiquitous?

Sometimes in the business world, an idea is so well-anticipated that it’s an instant smash (most anything by Apple, for instance). Other times, you have a product that’s more of a “stealth hit.” The Keurig is just such a stealth hit – slowly creeping its way into our lives and suddenly ruling the coffee world. That’s not hyperbole, either. I truly believe that the Keurig is redefining how we consume coffee, and this is something to pay attention to (especially if you’re selling coffee).

Think about it. Surveys tells us that 73% of coffee in the US is made at home. That’s not news. And Starbucks has thrived in spite of this. However, consumers want what they want, the way they want it, inexpensively – and they want their coffee fast! In hard economic times, superfluous trips to Starbucks are the first to go. Keurig couldn’t have stealthily cornered the market at a better time.

Still not convinced? While in-home coffee maker sales have grown only 1% annually over the last 7-10 years, 2010 total revenue for Keurig brewers hit $330.8 million – a 67% gain over 2009. Developed in 1998, these single-cup coffee systems are now in 7% of households (and this doesn’t include all those offices with these coffee makers – 200,000 office installations in 2010 alone). This is incredible growth for a product introduced 15 years ago!

In fact, Keurig (which, it should be noted, was bought out by Green Mountain Coffee Company in 2006) is staking such a claim on the coffee industry that even Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks are producing K-cups for the brewers. That’s right – the coffee giants are teaming up with the little guy – who, by all accounts, doesn’t appear to be so little any more.

This type of success begs the obvious question:
What did Keurig do right?

That’s actually easier to answer than you might think. You see, Keurig is a near-perfect example of an I³ Value Proposition in action (see related post), and therein lies its success:

• The Keurig is Innovative: The Keurig entrepreneurs took a few simple ideas – that every cup of coffee should be fresh, and that everyone should choose what type of coffee they want, whenever they want – and made it happen in a clearly innovative way. The innovation was in the engineering to make these objectives easily attainable.
   
• The Keurig is Indispensable: With 2.5 million Keurig beverages made each day, I think we can safely conclude that the K-cup is indispensable to its owners – a part of their everyday lives.
   
• The Keurig is Inspirational: Keurig has come up with the type of product that consumers (and business professionals) are consistently interested in – even after using it day in and day out. I can easily marvel out loud at a Keurig in action, in any office – and have those around me join in. This is after we’ve all seen it do its thing hundreds of times. It’s still a “wow!”

So what’s next? We know they’ve made a great product, as well as countless great cups of coffee – but what will this niche coffee giant come up with next? Also – isn’t there an environmental concern with all those K-cups?

More thoughts on that next time…

Meanwhile:

• Is Keurig just dominating in-home coffee maker sales – or will it begin to impact Starbucks and other destination shops?
• How else do you think Keurig has changed the coffee business in the last ten years?
• Do you use a single-cup brewing system at home or at the office?
• What other “I³” ideas do you see cornering their markets?

It’s pretty obvious that using Twitter is a smart customer service tactic. In mere moments, your company can connect one-on-one with your customer – solving their problems and building their trust. Twitter can be an invaluable humanization tool for your disposal, if you know how to use it.

In a recent interview with Seer Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds, he tells of his personal customer service disaster story with a large and popular airline. When he needed help on the check-in website, Reynolds sent a tweet to their customer service handle on Twitter. As he awaited a response, he noticed that many others were tweeting with similar concerns. Instead of responding to countless customer concerns, the customer service Twitter account only responded to celebrity Star Jones. Immediately, what this airline communicated to their customers was that they weren’t important. It didn’t matter how many thousands of miles Reynolds had flown with them; he wasn’t a “celebrity”, and so he didn’t matter to them.

Don’t let this scenario happen to your company. Before you decide to take your customer service to Twitter, here are five guidelines to consider:

1. Make it a Policy: Don’t just assume people know how to act online. Before you throw an employee out into the live and interactive world-wide-web, make sure you have a policy on their conduct, and the way they represent your company.
    
2. Make Hours Apparent: Only respond to tweets within the confines of your business hours, and make sure your hours are explicitly shown on your Twitter profile page. If you inform your customer when you are and aren’t there, they won’t feel ignored when you don’t answer right away. It also protects your company from seeming cold (by not responding) or inconsistent (by sometimes-but-not-always responding at 8 pm).
    
3. Make It Real: Automated responses don’t cut it. The customers are too savvy for that, and they won’t grow to trust your brand through automated responses. Educate your employees so that they know exactly how to respond – in word and in deed.
    
4. Make the Responses Happen: Make sure you have enough people working on the account in order to respond to every customer concern – no matter if they’ve used your company once, a thousand times, or if they are (or aren’t) a celebrity. As Reynolds points out, if your employee is only able to respond to one out of three tweets, it’s time to hire more people. Every tweet directed “@” you must be answered, or it’s not worth doing.
    
5. Make It Actionable: Ensure that your employees can respond in actionable ways. It’s not enough to simply say, “I’m sorry that’s not working.” You have to take it to the next level and be able to say, “I’m sorry that’s not working; here’s what we’re going to do for you.”

A company that is engaging with people and helping them solve their problems is seen as a company that people trust and want to use. Your customers become your personal advocates. The reputation you build through social media interaction has a payoff.

How have you seen social media (and Twitter in particular) hurt or help a business?

Are you currently using a social media platform to address customer service needs?

Wil Reynolds is Founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, a leading SEO and search marketing firm in Philadelphia.

Over the past 11 years, Wil Reynolds has dedicated himself to doing two things well: driving traffic to sites from search engines and analyzing the impact that traffic has on the bottom line of companies. Wil’s career began at a web marketing agency in 1999, where he spearheaded the SEO strategies for companies that included Barnes & Noble, Disney, Harman Kardon, Debeers, Doubleclick, Hotjobs, and Mercedes Benz USA (to name a few). Although the internet bubble burst, Wil’s passion for web marketing has always been strong. Wil founded SEER Interactive in 2002.

I’ve written before about the lessons we can learn from Research In Motion’s failure to keep ahead of their market (and we all saw how the market reacted to Netflix’s little flub), but with 2011 now behind us, I think there are some lessons worth revisiting.

Let’s take a closer look at two companies that were clearly top players: Research In Motion (RIM), once again, and American Airlines. Notice: the key word in that sentence is, “were.”

Here’s the bottom line, and the biggest lesson we’ve learned from 2011: even though you may be on top, it doesn’t mean you’re invincible. The problem with rising to the top is getting too arrogant – too cocky – and not bothering to maintain your competitive edge. We saw this hubris clearly displayed by RIM and American Airlines.

RIM taught us that even though you may be on top – even though you were the first in your industry to release a groundbreaking product – it doesn’t mean you can get away with releasing bad products. The customers are too smart for that, and they will take their smartphone business somewhere else (and, in fact, they have).

American Airlines taught us that it doesn’t always pay to be the lone wolf, and that there is safety in numbers. In the wake of a faltering airline business, we saw two great mergers: United and Continental, and Delta and Northwest. While the other major airlines combined forces, American tried to tough it out alone… And they failed: AMR went from being the largest airline in the US to small potatoes, barely eking in at third place behind the other major carriers.

What were the underlying culprits behind such poor business decisions? What were the causes that issued these companies their death sentences? Without being on the inside, it’s hard to say, but we can certainly take heed of the warnings in these tales of woe.

1) Stay On Your Game (Don’t Be Lazy)

When you’re on top, you could easily buy into the lie that you’ve done the work, and now is your time to reap the rewards. Not so fast. This is an ever-changing, dynamically-demanding world. Every day, technology is evolving and customers want the newest and flashiest technology available (e.g., iPhone 4S). If you decide to take a break from researching and releasing groundbreaking products, expect the customers to take a break from you (and possibly never return).

2) Stay In Your Game (Don’t Lose Touch with Your Market)

While the rest of the world was rapidly moving to touch screens, RIM was releasing the same old models. What’s more, they weren’t even good models. The promised QNX-based smartphones have been delayed twice, and RIM’s customers (and stockholders) are rapidly losing hope. Failure to keep your head in the game – and pay attention to what your competitors are doing and what your customers want – will cost you your competitive edge, your stockholders, and your customers.

3) Gather Your Allies (Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help)

All seemed hopeless for the airline industry until the two mergers were announced. Combining forces was the way to go, but American Airlines missed out. Either they thought they were untouchable in this market, or they just missed the boat. In either case, it’s better to ask for help than file for bankruptcy. Allowing your past success to cloud your current judgement might result in the collapse of your company.

4) Treat People With Respect (Don’t Forget the People that Make Your Business Run)

When you’re on top, it’s an easy trap to start thinking of yourself as better than the people who work for you. American Airlines went into tense negotiations with their pilots, and the reality is that how you treat your staff translates into how your staff treats your customers (i.e., not well). So not only was AMR receiving bad press from filing for Chapter 11, but now they were playing the “bad guys” in the battle with their own staff. Not a great move. When you’re calling the shots in a company, make sure you respect the people who work for you; they are a huge part of the reason you’re succeeding, and should be treated as such.

So as we get into the swing of 2012, take these lessons from 2011 to heart. As a business leader, it’s your job to say “when” – when to jump ahead of your market, when to protect your business, and when to show your customers/employees/stockholders you appreciate them. But, as we witnessed through various companies in the past year, just make sure you say “when” before it’s too late.

We’re all familiar with this story.

A business is at the top of its game, makes a trajectory-decision based on an assumption, and subsequently misses the mark. In this case, the business is Netflix, the assumption was about its customer base, and – as we all witnessed (and were perhaps, as Netflix customers, privy to the news via e-mail) – Netflix missed the mark.

A year ago, if anyone had said that within the span of one month, Netflix would lose 800,000 customers and its stock would plummet, that person would have been laughed out of the “society of business punditry.” Netflix was the game-changer of how people consumed movies – arguably responsible for the closure of Blockbuster Videos around the country, as well as much of the Internet’s traffic. There was basically no current competition for Netflix; the business was at the top, gaining two-plus million new customers every quarter. Things were golden, until…

…until a haphazard blog post announced a price hike of 60%.
…until CEO Reed Hastings issued a disarmingly casual “I-messed-up” e-mail.
…until they decided to split the service into two different services
     (instant streaming staying as Netflix, and “Qwikster” for DVDs by mail).
…until they retracted that decision.

Netflix had a good business model. They had loyal customers. They had happy stockholders.

What went wrong?

First: Netflix made an assumption about their customer base, and this assumption was egregiously incorrect. They assumed that their customers were passionate enough about Netflix to stick by the business – that no matter what, these customers wanted their movies and would continue to use Netflix’s services. Although Netflix was right about their customers being passionate, they didn’t realize the passion would be railed against the company itself. In response to a price hike and change of services, Netflix’s customer base passionately informed the company of their disappointment and disapproval, and 800,000 of them jumped ship.

Second: Netflix employed poor communication and execution of the changes in service. Whether or not the new business model was good or necessary is one thing, but the way Netflix both announced and unveiled the changes fell short of their game. The announcement of changes first came through a seemingly slap-it-together blog post late at night, which sent the Internet ablaze in fury. Then Reed Hastings sent out an e-mail one might expect from a college buddy rather than the CEO of a company.

Finally, they retracted their decisions within a month of the first announcement. In the meantime, amidst all of these embarrassing communication flubs, the Qwikster website was not ready when the service launched, and the Twitter account was already in use by a drug-using teenager with foul language. All in all, the launch was sloppy. It seemed uncoordinated – like a last-minute decision gone awry.

We could spend all day disputing and defending the good and the bad and the ugly of Netflix’s recent business decisions, but I’m more interested in discussing the implications every business can take from this situation.

So what can we learn here?

What we can learn is that when you’re on top – when you’ve positioned yourself as a leader in your market, even if its just your local market – each decision must be well thought out (and hopefully the right one).

In the fast changing business world of today, it’s sometimes necessary to make drastic changes to a working business model. But before you are ready to go to the presses (or your customers) with these changes, make sure the model is carefully thought through in minute detail. Not analysis paralysis – but at least a thorough vetting with trusted voices. You have to at least try to do everything right or don’t do it at all.

If you are going to make business decisions based on assumptions, make sure they are the right assumptions. Validate them. Test them. Make sure you have the data to back it up before you go ahead and change your business model.

Once you have your facts in place, make sure you communicate well to all affected stakeholders. When you’ve amassed a loyal customer base, you need to keep them by respecting them, and respect comes through how you communicate. When all of these factors are set in place, ensure that your new business model is ready to launch from all sides of the company. You can’t cut corners – the market is too demanding and too connected for that.

Recently, there’s been lots of news covering Research in Motion, the Canadian-based company behind Blackberry. Although Blackberry has entered the lexicon as a standard reference to smart phones – frequently referred to in movies, TV shows, etc. – the reality is that for the last five years, Blackberry has been losing market share, and losing its position as the definer of email-enabled phones to iPhones and Android.

What must be particularly galling to Research in Motion, more so than the iPhone’s success – which was a truly groundbreaking product (which RIM tried to imitate with their touch product) – is the onslaught of Android, coming at the market from a completely different angle and making major headway. All in all, it has not been a good couple of years for Research in Motion.

So, what’s the lesson here for us?

Well, there are a couple. One is that when trends start shifting, you have to look down the road to see what’s really going on, and what you might need to do to respond.

The fundamental problem with the iPhone being better than the Blackberry was that it wasn’t really better, at least by many measures. Some people prefer a physical keyboard. Some people thought (and for a while it was quite true) that for corporate networks, Blackberry email had much more advanced security than Apple’s initial offering, and more so than Google’s Android system.

Where Research in Motion dropped the ball for Blackberry, however, was not looking at the trajectory of things. What was happening was that people were taking to the touch model very easily, and so that became a major new trend. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, they were looking at the empowerment of a large screen. Third, consumers become almost instantly enamored with having an almost infinite array of creative applications at their fingertips. So in many ways, the App Store and all the things related to customizing your experience were what set apart the iPhone, and later Android-based phones.

Look down the road at where your competitors are going. This is especially true in a highly-competitive market, and particularly if you are a leader in a category. Do not be dismissive of what the new competitor’s bringing to the table. Instead, ask yourself, What really changes, if I could fast-forward where they’re taking this? What is possible? What has been impossible for us, but maybe is possible for this new model – and can we adapt? Can we “join in”?

Without asking those questions – and it’s not likely that RIM’s executive suite were asking those questions, because that’s what happens when you’re on top – it’s easy to look down your nose at everything else that’s coming. It’s easy to only see the deficiencies of those players, missing where their strengths could develop, given enough time.

Given that this was Apple and later, Google, entering the market, it was arrogant to be dismissive of their ability to hammer away at a potential advantage, and make it the actual point of differentiation of their value proposition.

Apple didn’t just represent email, but functionally – from a user interface point of view – better email, and not just phone, but equal phone capabilities. The iPhone doesn’t just have download-able widgets – which Blackberry already had in some interesting little applications – but formed an entire ecosystem of completely flexible applications, that would not feel like, look like, or function like everything else that was previously available.

It was truly groundbreaking stuff, which of course is Apple’s strength. For all of us not competing against an Apple-caliber corporation, there still is a lesson to be learned about really “fast-forwarding” your competitors’ advantages to Where does that leave us – one-, three-, five years from now?

What’s a 1 Pager?

A “1 Pager,” also known as a cut sheet or a data sheet, is a [not surprisingly] single page of basic information about your company and product, that is usually sent in advance of, or “left behind” after a sales call.

The reason it’s important is not so much because anyone ever reads it. Nicely printed collateral in a sharp looking folder doesn’t really matter much anymore – most of your prospects will probably get their info from your website instead.

So what’s the point?

Developing the 1 Pager, more than other collateral, lets you capture your value proposition and the supporting details, while limiting you to the front and back of a single slice of paper. The challenge – and the value – of the 1 Pager is in narrowing down what you want to say to fit on one piece of paper.

As I’ve talked about in an earlier post, “Simplify for Understanding,” a lot of the time, less really is more. Jerry Seinfeld joked he could spend hours getting a punchline from 8 words to 5 words. It’s easier to write 10 pages than one really good page, because it forces you to be tight and succinct on what you want to say.

The real power is not in the 1 Pager, but in “zeroing in” on the essence of your message, without all the extra words, cutting straight to the bottom line.

Crafting a 1 Pager

The format of a 1 Pager is up to you or whomever designs your marketing collateral, but the structure should be something like:

• Company name and logo
• Tagline
• Your one or two sentence Value Prop statement, which is really a modified version of your Offering Concept Statement, adapted for use outside of your organization
• Features and benefits of your offering, to your prospective customer
• Some sort of proof statement – not a full blown case study, but a quote or example from a past/current customer
• Some sort of chart emphasizing your value proposition in I³ terms – what’s new about your offering, how it’s truly useful to your prospect, and what’s exciting about it for them.

You might end up with a 1 Pager that is actually a powerful piece of collateral, that you want to use as the basis for your website, in training your salespeople, and so on… but the real value is not in the document itself. The real value is in the process of nailing down what you really want your prospects to know – focusing and simplifying that message until it’s “short and sweet,” and being able to communicate that message efficiently and effectively.

Bottom Line:

• Access to “Power Players” is not as simple as “plug and play” but if you fine tune your approach it can be done.
• Before you tap into the power, make sure your Value Prop can back up your initial offering or claim. Until you can deliver, don’t be so quick to make the connection.
• Don’t assume that the power you need to access is at the top of the organization.
• Remember, power lies with the person who can say “yes” to your product or service, wherever they may be in the organizational structure.

Anyone involved in complex B2B sales is probably used to hearing the oft-repeated mantra, “get access to power” – gaining access to high levels of power within prospective organization is key – everyone, from sales trainers to sales VPs agree that you need it… but how exactly do you get access to power?

The answer from most sales training programs I’ve seen: just do it.

Unfortunately, sales training programs often have no real advice on HOW to do it. The simple truth is that access to power is hard to get. It’s not something you can “just do,” but it is something you can get good at.

You need access to the right people, and the right messages for those people when you’re given that access. If you’re a McKinsey Partner, you’ve got the organizational/personal clout to talk to most large company CEOs. In other words, a real understanding of power is connected to a realistic assessment of your organization and your offering. Reckless boldness can be offensive, and even embarrassing. Getting to the top for a short dialogue isn’t enough, if you’ve got nothing to back it up.

There is no “easy button” to making the sale. You have to make your organization and offering valuable to your prospect, and communicate that value to the right and necessary levels of the buying organization. That doesn’t always mean the very highest levels either.

I once worked with a firm that offered graphic support services. Their lead sales rep always focused on getting to top management of the ad agencies that made up their target market. He didn’t need to do that. The agency president or senior partner didn’t care one way or the other about graphic support, but their project managers did. Those project managers had the power to make those decisions, and the budget to find them. After some key coaching – we focused the rep on going to the right level – the highest level that could approve budget for their services.

In this day of increasingly flat organizations, we find authority at lower levels than ever before. The executive suite focuses on bigger things – markets, public relations, and long-term strategy. Unless your service offering addresses those issues, the CFO, CTO, President, or Chief Yahoo! isn’t going to care. You don’t necessarily have to get to the C-suite to win business – you have to get to the right suite.

You need access to the highest-level decision maker who affects your purchase order. Access to the top isn’t bad, but it isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. Most importantly, you have to know who you are talking to and why.

When you think about your competition, you most likely think of other companies with similar offerings to yours. These are your direct competitors, but they are certainly not your only competitors.

A more complete view of “who else” and “what else” is vying for your target customers’ attention (and budget dollars) requires that we look at alternatives – other ways to solve the same problem you solve.

Let’s look at competition earlier this decade in the Sales Force Automation and CRM space. Companies that equipped sales professionals with leather planners and filing systems or Palm Pilots (remember them?), integrating information through Microsoft Outlook, were looking to improve their sales force productivity. They were using alternatives to Salesforce.com or Oracle/Siebel’s CRM software.

They were addressing the same general problem of keeping track of customers, but not necessarily solving the problem in the same manner (or even as effectively) as Siebel or Salesforce.com.

Overlooking this point is a frequent source of much pain, for market planners and sales teams alike.

Before your offering existed, it is highly unlikely that your market was simply not addressing their need in some other way. Companies were doing bookkeeping long before and even during the advent of back-office computing. Many markets would show similar adoption behavior regarding new processes, systems, and product acceptance.

Often, when examining a competitive landscape, it is too easy to simply look at obvious peer group competitors. This often leads to making a case as to why your particular product offering is better, faster, or cheaper.

Imagine you were trying to talk your grandmother into getting an iPhone, discussing its relative merits over Android or a Blackberry… and she points across the room and says, “What do I need a new phone for? I’ve got one right over there on the wall!”

Companies often lose sight of the larger issue – the possibility that your prospects already have a way of doing things in a way they perceive as better or at least “not broken.”

You are not just competing against others offering similar products or services; you’re competing against every other way to “get it done,” possibly including the toughest competitor of all, “The way we’ve always done it.”

If so, what is your compelling story for change and transformation? What is your message to the marketplace – the message that counters the “status quo?”

What is your “You should switch now!” value proposition?

As an entrepreneur, product manager, or CEO, you have to be vigilant of what is going on in the marketplace. Are you taking a holistic view of both competitors and even more importantly, trends? Ask yourself: are you really offering something that has a truly distinct Value Proposition? If not, someone else will.

The following are practical suggestions for keeping up with Competitors, Alternatives, and Disruptors in the Marketplace:

1. Talk to your customers and prospects. Tell them that you really want to understand them and the marketplace better. Ask them: what other companies and products have you been looking at? Make this a conversation, not a survey process (although a survey is valid and good – it’s just different than talking to them).
2. Talk to your sales force. As hard as it may be to get real answers, you have to ask them about lost deals. Have you lost deals to specific competitors? Who else are prospects mentioning they are considering? Track this information but keep it simple. If you’re a one-person sales force, still do this as a “getting real” exercise.
3. The Internet. This one’s obvious – but it still requires that you take the time to do it! With the breadth and depth of web resources available, you can find out a lot about your competition at the click of a mouse. Enter key words of your value proposition into google and you will most likely locate your competitors. Create a Google (or other RSS-based) news feed with the key words included in your Value Proposition and check it daily. This low cost and easy dashboard is useful in keeping up with the marketplace. The more tightly defined your value proposition is, the more quickly you can start doing research and locate your competitors quickly.
4. Commission or purchase market research. While news may sometimes be “after the fact”, industry research houses (such as Gartner and Forrester in IT) discuss new products and technologies with vendors before they enter the marketplace. Professional research provides insight into the direction of companies within your industry. Analysts develop opinions about where a market is going. While no one is right all the time (most research firms overstated the dot-com revolution, for instance) – they provide another valuable voice to the discussion your firm needs to have regarding competitors, alternatives, and especially, disruptors.
5. Build relationships with key people within your specific trade press. These professionals closely follow your market and they can be critical for not only providing press coverage of your company and product, but also for sharing conversations about what’s going on in the marketplace and what’s coming down the pipeline.

By the time you launch a new product or service in a given market, you have already [hopefully] devoted a good deal of thought and research to identifying your ideal customer and their needs, developing your offering to meet those needs, and shaping your value proposition to inform them of this solution. However, there are usually some subtleties, and occasionally more significant factors, that only reveal themselves in a real-life “road test.”

Once you introduce your product, the core customers it attracts may be different from what you expected. Examine this opportunity, perhaps adapting and taking advantage of new customers that become another – or even – your primary market.

LEGO, the well-known children’s building block company, has found a successful niche in the model-building marketplace for older children. While selling toy kits, they found that they were in fact selling permanent models for hobbyists, so Lego expanded on this notion and now offers a website that encourages users to customize and design their own Lego models. This focus not only expanded their market base, but also created an online community that garnered more enthusiasm for the products.

This may be an opportunity to stake out your own brand new product category, as suggested by Joe Calloway in Becoming a Category of One. Calloway suggests that the answer to combating the crowded marketplace is to create your own product category, ensuring that your company is the only one who can do what you say you do. Easy to conceptualize – much harder to execute.

If you think you may have stumbled on an opportunity to “create” a market – to be the first entrant into a particular field, begin by reviewing your company’s non-standard successes. Look at the times your customers have asked you to customize solutions or create entirely new products. These customer requests are, by definition, unmet market needs, but how much of the particular unmet need is both repeatable and indicative of a larger market?

There is always the risk that you will end up mistaking a single customer request as a completely new market need. This is likely a result of mutual ignorance: both you and your customer are unaware that there are vendors who can successfully satisfy the “unmet need” – a fact which would become all-too-apparent if your firm rolled out a new offering without first understanding the target market as completely as practical or possible. (You can mitigate this risk with due diligence and appropriate market research.)

In short, the non-standard request may be a new and lucrative opportunity. Whatever the case may be, focus on your value proposition. How will it be relevant to a particular customer in a specific market context? In what group or groups do these customers lie? Identify the best fit with the highest probability of success, and put your new hypothesis into action. Most of all, continually sanity-check all your assumptions.

There are no magic words to cause your target customers to instantly come running to buy your offering. No subliminal messages or secret code will automatically make them realize they need the product or service you’re selling, much less that they should do business with your company, but a carefully crafted value proposition will let them know how your offering is valuable and relevant to them.

When a company’s leaders choose to launch a new product or service, they [should] have a specific market in mind. Market intelligence and identifying unmet needs in the marketplace led to the decision to build and launch this new product, so your value proposition should highlight the specific product/service benefits that most sharply meet those unmet (or under-served) needs.

To sell the product or service, state the benefits of your product or service to the target market in a way that helps them understand your offering– succinctly and powerfully. In essence, you have to communicate the product’s value to them with some urgency. Assess what attributes will be of highest value to the target customer– this is the value proposition’s “DNA” or core message.

In other words, a value proposition is the articulation of the promises that your company is willing to fulfill for its target market.

In the context of investing in a new product or service, one has to take a product to market with some type of purpose and message and this is the value proposition: “For the sake of whom are you offering what?”

This doesn’t mean making assumptions about a specific customer’s needs– there is no substitute for collaboratively solving a customer’s problem. A true solution-oriented sales professional will find out what a particular prospect’s issues are before assuming they have a situation-specific value proposition for that customer, which requires a meaningful two-way conversation with the customer. Then, the salesperson can match your offering’s benefits to a prospect’s needs and deliver a value proposition that states what the product is and why it would be important to a particular market.

Your salespeople should view their customers as allies, not adversaries. You aren’t looking to win something at your customer’s expense, but to consult with them to identify and deliver relevant solutions, figure out how to make it relevant and further, and whether it will continue to be relevant in target market.

If you build it, they will come.

We have probably all learned by now that this is just not true. Great or stellar product features are not enough. Being better is not enough. Even being the best is not enough. The imperative for today’s companies is to build a stellar message to accompany your stellar product in the marketplace. Your product cannot and will not sell itself, no matter how good it is. While marketers are trying to manage word-of-mouth (i.e., “buzz marketing”) and other viral marketing techniques, these have less relevance for business products and services and we’ll see how later.

Additionally, your prospect is too busy to really study your offering to see relevant attributes that you know are great. Keep in mind the realistic potential of the promises that firms can reasonably make to their target audiences. That is – refine your messaging so that it becomes a powerful marketing and sales tool.

By translating your refined and dynamic value proposition into what we call “Sales Cases” for your direct sales teams – your product and its grounded message will enter the marketplace with a strong messaging foundation.

A simple and refined I³ Value Proposition describes your product’s promises as an Innovative, Indispensable and Inspirational solution. The Sales Cases draw on the I³ Value Proposition, providing sales professionals with a well-developed marketing message targeted to the needs of specific customers, in the dimensions of decision making that organizations typically use to make purchases: namely, business, technical, financial, competitive and overall decision cases.

Don’t make the mistake of going to market without a polished messaging platform – one that flows from brand, positioning, and tagline to business focused cases as well. Take the time to understand why the product is valuable to prospects and make a clear case as to why the product is Innovative, Indispensable and Inspirational.

Does your messaging make the value of your offering readily apparent to your prospect? Or are you waiting for them to figure it out themselves? (Hint: They won’t. Do it for them.)

I was recently on my way to deal with a family emergency, and I needed to pick up some cash at a local ATM.

There’s a bank in an office building on a nearby wooded street, and it’s a little bit unusual, in that this building  looks more like a medical office building or something like that. The branch was in the lobby area. I went in, took out the cash I needed and paid the extra $2 fee, because I needed to get on the highway near this location and I was under time pressure.

In that context, I also needed to find the restroom, so I step out into the office lobby that’s adjoining the bank – sponsored by the bank – and the doors on the bathroom say For Employees Only, and are locked!

What’s amazing about this– having grown up in New York, and being used to seeing banks in New York that clearly could not have a public restroom in that context, because of the vagrants and other security issues in a large metropolitan area– was that this bank was in an area that clearly only their customers, or people who would otherwise be in that office building (and therefore presumably would go to their offices), would ever even be here.

In other words, this locked door made no sense, either for security, hygiene, or aesthetics. It just made no sense. It was there for no good reason, except to inconvenience a customer.

Do you have mindless policies– things that you’ve put in place, or that you inherited in your business, or in the way you do things, maybe things you require of your customers– that are really stupid if you were to take a step back and take a look at them, and say, “Why am I even asking for this information?” or “Why do I make people do these things to deal with us as a company?”

Think about it. Take a step back, because if you fail to do so, customers won’t necessarily tell you– they’ll just take their business elsewhere.