Some of you may already know that this year, one of the MLC’s key goals is to help marketers activate their information to generate better insights and improve decision-making.  One key perspective is relates to customer understanding: most organizations already use a variety of market research techniques to better understand their customers.  However, even when they can gather quality information, they have difficulty producing effective business insights.  Why are marketers struggling here?  The answer can be pretty complex, so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just look at customer understanding within a new product development context.

Traditional research methods – including win/loss analyses, voice of the customer, etc. – don’t usually identify actual problems that customers are trying to solve.  The information is mostly limited to existing offers, revealing little about how customers actually derive value from them.  Then there are the non-product-focused techniques, like focus groups or anthropological research.  Unfortunately, analysis of this type of information often involves a level of “inference,” which means that the resulting insights are open for speculation.  As one might expect, interpretation discrepancies so early in the NPD process can lead to disappointing new product launches.

Let’s see how the marketing team at Reynolds & Reynolds (R&R) is able to overcome these two shortcomings.

First, R&R implements a rigorous methodology, surveying their customers to understand their:

• Jobs – individual activities that combined make up a business workflow
• Desired outcomes – measures of success when completing a job

This allows R&R to move away from a product-centric perspective towards a focus on their customers’ goals and success metrics, giving them a better understanding how their customers actually value their offerings.

Next, they survey their customers again to filter those desired outcomes by importance and satisfaction to identify which are important but underserved.  These then become focal points that align the solutions innovation community, streamlining the NPD process.

The results? In what was considered to be a highly saturated market segment, R&R’s first implementation of the jobs-outcomes methodology was extremely successful.  They uncovered nearly 400 high-importance, low-satisfaction customer goals, leading to a sevenfold increase in the number of solution-worthy opportunities.

Talk about a way to make your customers work for you!

MLC members, to learn more about how R&R did all of the above, read the full case study here.

This post was written by former colleague Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council. Visit the original here.

In my previous post, I argued that the conflict of interest between energy & utility companies and their customers makes these companies’ business models unsustainable. In short, the more efficiently customers use energy, the less money energy suppliers make—and customers won’t remain in the dark forever.

The solution, I believe, is to stop selling stuff (kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules) and start selling outcomes (light, heat, and motion). Indeed, one forward-thinking utility company recently shared with us their new Commercial Teaching pitch that focuses B2B customers on the money they could save from energy efficiency building retrofits, and off the price per kilowatt-hour.

It’s a compelling pitch, especially in deregulated markets. The customer saves money off its energy bill (the payback period is typically just 3-5 years), and the supplier picks up a new account.

But while energy investments make economic sense, customers have been surprisingly slow on the uptake, frequently rejecting energy projects that are in their economic self-interest.

For example, a contact in the green building industry warned me that most decision-makers are unreasonably skeptical of energy solutions, due to a lack of case studies proving they work, and the inherent difficulty with quantifying energy savings (i.e., external conditions may cause energy use to increase, even though that increase may be less than it would have been otherwise thanks to energy saving projects.).

Therefore, just as in any case when a customer is not thinking about its business properly, the burden falls on Sales to reframe how customers think about energy use. Read More »

Last week, The Economist ran a thought provoking piece on the future of news.  As I read it, I was struck by the parallels to some consumer goods and services categories, like apparel, quick service restaurants, electronics and even some kinds of fast moving consumer goods.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets: Read More »

One of the most unsettling aspects of business purchase decisions is deciding whether or not you’re buying the right thing. Purchasers fret a lot less over whether they’ve bought the “best” over the “better” product than they do over whether they’ve eliminated “bad” product in favor of the “good”. Risk needs to be addressed, and addressed well.

Moreover, in any environment, risk left unspecified turns into uncertainty, which is still risky, but worse. When I go to Vegas and sit down at the roulette table, I know the chances that little ball lands on the colored pocket I select is only 1 in 38. When I go to bed at night and my neighbor upstairs drops one shoe, I wake up to the uncertainty of not knowing whether or when the other shoe will drop. The time I stay awake in anticipation is longer, thus more frustrating.

Many companies believe that emphasizing positive differentiators is the key to winning business. This is true but insufficient. We forget that for the most part success is simply the absence of failure, as opposed to of the celebration of pure technical genius. It is this less inspiring definition that requires marketers to be able to focus on risk as much as they do their value proposition. With the economic recovery in slow motion, you cannot afford to let your prospects and customers wake up to the realization that their supplier may or may not be there when issues arise with their purchases. Worse still is the tendency of many companies to get tongue tied when asked what the underbelly of their offering looks like.

Our survey data shows that not only do risk conversations matter, it matters how you convey that information to customers. In a set of scenario questions fielded this year, we asked real business customers to assess their willingness to pay for hypothetical products that differ only in terms of how their risky aspect is presented. Here’s what we learned: Read More »

(The following is a guest post from David Sroka, President and CEO of Point of Reference, a customer referral program provider.)

The marketing department in B2B firms is typically responsible for producing “evidence” of satisfied customers in the form of case studies, quotes, press releases and videos. This customer content has plenty of uses and users, but arguably, the heaviest consumer is the sales force. Like other marketing “investments,” there’s an imperative to make decisions that garner the biggest bang for the buck. So how should the marketing department decide how to spend its finite budget when it comes to sales-accelerating assets like customer content? Start by considering the current range of available content relative to where it’s needed in the sales cycle. For instance, press releases and one-page success stories are perfectly appropriate early on in the sales cycle, but less meaningful and effective in the middle to later stages.  Full ROI case studies, often 5-10 pages in length, are overkill for the early stages when buyers are merely tire kicking.

To provide a framework for this approach we created a tool to help you link various content types to various sales stages: Read More »

This post was written by Amy Gallo for our Finance and Strategy Practice.

Everyone complains about their boss from time to time. In fact some in the U.S. consider it a national workplace pastime. But there’s a difference between everyday griping and stressful dissatisfaction, just as there is a clear distinction between a flawed manager and a truly horrible boss.

Difficult bosses come in lots of different flavors. Your manager might be overly controlling, giving you little to no autonomy. Or perhaps she rarely shows up at the office, doesn’t give you direction or feedback, and has no idea what you do all day. Bad bosses may be insecure, incompetent, or simply new and inexperienced. First-time managers are often more likely to hinder than enhance employee performance and potential. A 2005 study by CEB’s CLC Learning and Development Roundtable found that nearly 60% of first-time managers underperform in their role.

Working for a bad boss has a large effect on your work experience. Managers have a direct effect on how you perform and whether you want to stay in your job. They are the conduit between you, the organization, the team, and your job. This goes both ways. Not all bosses are bad of course and great bosses can inspire people to do more. CLC Human Resources found in its research Managing in the Downturn: Four Imperatives to Drive Employee Innovation and Performance (for CLC members) that managers are increasingly important for improving discretionary effort: the impact of manager quality on whether employees go above and beyond the call of duty has jumped by 50% since the recession began. On the flip side, bad bosses sap motivation, kill productivity and drive everyone crazy.

If you work for someone you wish you didn’t, consider this: Read More »