Thoughts, ideas, and lessons learned from real-world customer engagements and interactions...
The movement is underway!
6 Jan 2010 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Development
First off, let me begin by wishing everyone a fantastic and prosperous 2010. Personally, I think that although there may be some more challenges in the economy and business that we will all face this year, I am extremely optimistic about not only our business but many of our customers businesses for this upcoming year.
One of the things that is making me extremely excited about this new year is the movement which I have been watching and participating in as it relates to the true understanding of the importance of customers and the vital role that they need to play within all aspects of a successful companies business processes.
I want to step back for a second and set the stage regarding this topic. First off, in the first part of last year I completed publishing of my book – “Building Sales Momentum Through Client Focused Development”. Although I had done quite a bit of research as part of the building of this book, in approximately May I stumbled upon a video of Eric Ries talking about his experience at IMVU, and what he was calling the Lean Startup Methodology. After watching the video, I did some more research and came across Steve Blank who not only was doing some joint presentations in Silicon Valley with Eric, but is also a professor for the Entrepreneurship program at UC Berkley. Steve Blank had published a book entitled “The Four Steps To The Epiphany”.
We have been “practicing what we preach”…
11 Aug 2009 | No Comments | posted by admin | in News
We have been “practicing what we preach”….We have listened to our clients.
Over the last number of months we have been out talking with our network, meeting with potential clients, and completing a number of customer engagements. All through this process we have been asking questions and trying to understand ways that we may improve, and make what we offer even better. We received some amazing feedback from a number of these clients on a number of different aspects of our business. First, they told us that our website led them to believe that our process and methodology was only for start-ups and early stage companies, however they clearly saw that companies of different sizes and stages of growth could benefit from what we had to offer. So, just like what we help our customers to do….we listened to our clients and made some changes. Take a look around the site, and you can see the changes that we have made to clearly articulate our offerings and the value to companies in all of the various stages of their growth. We are always looking for more ways to improve, so please contact us if you have any feedback or if we can be of assistance in any way.
Second, with many of the very early stage companies (Concept and Seed Stages), we know the challenges that you face as it relates to managing your resources and trying to build some momentum for your new company. Having said this, we have created a new way for you to get some very basic initial market feedback regarding your product or service with minimal investment. We have recently launched www.techhotornot.com where each week we post a new technology for people to review, and provide some basic market validation for your solution. We have had some amazing response to the site so far and have already provided some real-world market feedback to a number of initial companies. Through the site, we are also continuing to build a database of “Panel Experts” who have joined the panel to review and potentially provide some real-world testing for new technologies that are of interest to them. This database is continuing to grow.
So, have you gotten out and talked with some of your customers lately? If not, then there is no better time than the present in order to do so. We will continue to find opportunities to listen to our customers, and implement this feedback in order to make our company and our offerings even stronger. And since this is what we “preach”, we will continue to find new and creative ways to help our customers to do so as well.
