20 Ways to Strengthen Your B2B Product Strategy With Customer Insights
People use products and services to satisfy needs, solve problems and achieve desired outcomes. B2B suppliers that tap into these important motivations improve their chance of success because they can build and then steer their offerings to align with them. Below are twenty practical ways you can infuse a deeper understanding of your target customer into your strategies throughout your product’s journey.
The crucial first steps you take in your product’s life will help ensure that what you design, develop and introduce will have a high likelihood of being successful. Taking the following customer-centric actions will enable you to decide on the ideas and concepts that have the greatest potential, define and design your product to meet customer needs, build your product the optimal way, and effectively launch your product in the market.
Ideas and Concepts
1. Explore the behaviors of your target customers and their satisfaction with existing solutions.
2. Generate ideas by discovering unmet needs and unsolved problems both on the surface and at the root cause level.
3. In the form of concepts or prototypes, test the viability of your product and service ideas by learning: customer likes and dislikes about the ideas; customer ability to see the connection between your ideas and their needs or problems; perceptions about the uniqueness of your ideas; price and value perceptions; and likelihood to purchase.
4. Reassess a narrowed-down and refined set of concepts to identify the best candidate(s).
Definition and Design
5. Gather the customer-based evidence needed to support your business case and roadmap.
6. Define and prioritize your product requirements by eliciting specific customer requirements.
7. Measure customer reaction to proposed features, functionality and attributes.
8. Develop your positioning by pinpointing the unique and advantageous space in your customer’s mind where your product will sit.
9. Discover and validate distinct differences between customer types to create customer and user personas.
Development
10. Keep an eye on customer needs during development to make sure they aren’t changing.
11. Test the product with customers to confirm that it works the way it should and provides the desired customer experience.
12. Solicit customer feedback to prioritize features.
Introduction and Launch
13. With customer input, create and fine-tune your value proposition, positioning, messaging, content, and sales enablement.
14. Listen closely to the voice of the customer to ensure that you use their language rather than technical terms and jargon.
Post-Launch
Once your product has been launched, it’s vitally important that you continue to view the world through your customer’s eyes to be certain that your product is performing optimally, that you quickly address deviations from your plans, and that you uncover any new strategic options. The customer-driven activities described below will give you the insights necessary to determine where improvements in your product are needed and what your best alternatives are for new courses of action.
15. Conduct win/loss interviews with your new customers and lost prospects to understand the product-specific factors that are pivotal in the purchase decision and how your product matches up against the competition.
16. Gather information on the type of customer your product is attracting and how this differs, if at all, from your original target customer. Investigate the reasons for any divergence and the need for reevaluating your target market strategy.
17. Measure the extent to which your current customers are using your product’s features. If they are using a feature, how useful is it to them and why? If they aren’t using the feature, why not and what would increase the likelihood they would use it?
18. Determine the degree to which individual elements of your product experience impact your customer’s perception of their overall product experience, customer experience, and likelihood to remain a customer.
19. Investigate what’s driving the perceived ease of use of your product by learning customer opinions about aspects such as time and number of steps to accomplish tasks, on-screen instructions and prompts, clarity of language and terms, menus and lists, help guides, and feelings of mastery, control and enjoyment.
20. Prioritize product enhancements by evaluating each one’s perceived value and likely impact on customer purchase intent and loyalty.
Walking in your target customer’s shoes throughout the product journey will greatly improve your ability to create more realistic and effective product strategies, deliver unmatched customer experiences, and produce increased customer loyalty and advocacy.
To learn more about how Inquisitive will help you gain the product insights you need, visit our page here Product Management Research, or contact us.
Great share here and great tips. There’s so much data available now in systems (CRM, POS, Google Analytics) the opportunities are endless. When combined with traditional market research it pairs the what with the why perfectly to maximize insights.
George