Table of Contents
Introduction
To anticipate your customers’ needs and fulfill them better than your competitors, you need to get close to them. You must get so close that you blur the lines between your and your customers’ organizations. You need to:
- Share your strategy with your customers.
- Become part of your customers’ community.
- Develop enduring collaborations.
Share Your Strategy
You need customer feedback on your product roadmaps, new product plans, and product performance to ensure you consistently produce winning products. Also, your customers and potential customers need you to share your strategy and plans so they can:
- Be sure that you will meet their requirements.
- Understand their options for addressing their issues.
- Be aware of profit and growth opportunities.
Seeking customer feedback will also help you build credibility and improve your customer relationships. It shows a genuine desire to understand your customers’ business and contribute to their success.
Voice-of-the-customer is your process for getting feedback on your strategy and plans. See Chapter 10, How to Capture the Voice of the Customer for a detailed tutorial.
Become Part of Their Community
In your own company, you are part of a community, the other employees. You interact with them every day. With each interaction, you get to know the other community members better. You develop intimacy. You learn:
- What their needs are.
- How they define their own success.
- How you can help them.
- How they can help you.
- How to improve the way you work together.
These are the same things you need to know about your market to create and articulate a compelling value proposition. To learn them, you need frequent and varied interactions with your customers’ community. Your customers’ community includes:
- People in your customers’ organizations
- Your customers’ customers
- Your customers’ other suppliers
- Industry groups
- Industry analysts
- Your competitors
You need to be an active member of this community. Get to know all the community’s members. Be a resource to them. Use them as resources. Active customer community members:
- Meet and help industry analysts.
- Attend and take part in conferences and trade shows.
- Conduct joint roadmap reviews with customers.
- Get customer feedback on new product plans.
- Create user groups and contribute to their meetings.
- Get to know your customers’ other suppliers.
- Meet with players in adjacent markets.
- Participate in industry groups.
- Develop personal relationships with peers across the entire community.
Seek Enduring Collaborations
The best product managers seek enduring customer collaborations that blur the line between their organization and their customers’ organizations. Enduring collaborations are a constant presence by a supplier to help their customers:
- Find new ways to improve profitability and growth.
- Implement their product roadmaps.
- Overcome obstacles to success.
- Get more out of the systems they have already bought from you.
If you want to get closer to your customers, you need to live and work with them. Your applications team is in the perfect position to help you with this. An applications team carries out all those activities that ensure your products will be successful in your customers’ environment. They:
- Manage new product beta partner programs.
- Qualify new products for market introduction.
- Develop and maintain in-house equipment and process characterization capability.
- Help customers resolve application and integration problems.
- Work with customers to develop new applications for your equipment.
This team should be indistinguishable from the one your customers employ to use, qualify, and maintain equipment like yours. Therefore, your applications team needs:
- Technical skills that reflect those of your customers.
- An understanding of the processes upstream and downstream from the one your equipment performs, including process integration.
- An operational mindset that echoes that of your customers.
- The ability to run demonstration and applications labs with the same discipline that your customers employ to run your equipment in their facilities.
Your applications team is not your only opportunity to create enduring collaborations. Your field service team can also be an enduring collaboration generator. Service engineers are on site every day helping your customers:
- Keep your equipment running.
- Meet production goals.
- Solve problems.
Your service engineers are indistinguishable from your customers’ equipment engineers. They often feel more affinity for their customers than they do for their employer. They even wear facility access badges with your customers’ logos on them.
Applications and service teams walk, talk, and act like your customers. Your customers seek them out whenever they need help to solve process, equipment, or production problems. They treat them as an extension of their organization. These teams are your conduit to enduring customer collaborations that can reveal your customers’ critical problems and inspire valuable products to solve them.