Customer centric thinking is essential for commercial success, and it's relatively simple to deliver
Customer centric thinking is essential for commercial success, and it's relatively simple to deliver.
If you’re looking to build a successful B2B product strategy, understanding your customer is critical.
First, start with your existing customers. Never overlook this group. Evolving with their needs and retaining them is essential. And there’s only one approach to this – you need to dive straight in and ask them what they think of you. Ideally face to face, perhaps mixed with some quantitative, depending on the size of your customer base and variety of stakeholders you interact with.
The benefits of doing this are plentiful:
A 360, market led view of your business and products
Inspiration on how you could expand into adjacent services and products
Ability to assess your in house skills and resources in line with your findings
Optimisation of your go to market messaging to drive new business
Top tips for working qualitative research into your annual plan:
Don’t be shy. Tell them their opinion is important to your business. There’s no shame in acknowledging that.
Be explicit. Ask them clear, open questions and ask them to respond honestly
Seek to understand what they like and what they don’t like about your current service or product
How do you compare to your competitors? Ask.
Dig deeper into how your service fits into their overall business strategy and how they see it evolving over time.
Ask which product or service providers they work with or have considered in adjacent markets.
Make it regular. Actively diarise it, share your questions in advance so they have time to formulate their thoughts.
Act on what you discover. And tell them.
Letting your customers help hone your offering means they have more skin in the game. More skin in the game leads to greater loyalty and advocacy. It’s a win win.
