By Rob Hamshar
WD-40, the famed degreasing and rust-preventing agent, is widely known for its versatility. As the story goes, it was originally designed and marketed in the aerospace industry to aid in airplane maintenance. But through the years, thousands of new applications were found and problems solved. Everything from lubricating door-hinges to de-squeaking bedsprings to freeing tongues stuck to frozen metal in wintertime. The value of a can of WD-40 has undoubtedly increased in the mind of consumers as its perceived utility increased.
The reality is, most B2B companies are much more capable of doing something very similar. One example that we’ve found is from Dow Chemical. Like many B2B companies, Dow has a broad array of products and services and interacts with their customers in many different ways. But, through surveys and conversations with their sales reps, they’ve found that there are often pockets of customers within every customers segment that tend to value a particular part of Dow’s offer far more than other customers in the same segment.
So why does this happen? And what opportunity does it present? These situations can arise when a customer discovers a “new” application for your product, but that’s a rare occurrence. More often, it’s a situation where a customer has found some way of extracting more value out of your offering than you’d intended. Dow, in trying to understand these scenarios, found these situations typically arise for one of the following three reasons:
- The product/experience attribute in question aligns with a macrotrend that is gradually increasing in importance (and likely valued by a “first mover”).
- The product/experience attribute in question has a significant impact on business processes not yet appreciated by most customers.
- The product/experience attribute in question represents a need that is only relevant and important at a specific stage in a customer’s business life cycle.
If you can identify these instances in your own market (see Dow’s process for doing this), they present you with prime opportunities for “teaching” customers—guiding them to appreciate ways you can impact their business that they hadn’t seen before.
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