Aldo Zini once spent several weeks sitting in a pharmacy.
It may not be the fast-paced, high-tech task you’d expect for the president and CEO of Aethon, a developer of robots that attach to hospital carts and deliver anything from linens to lab specimens. But Zini was there to connect with potential customers.
“Too often, companies come up with neat ideas or neat products but they haven’t thought through how you actually solve a problem,” Zini says. “You have to do an analysis around what benefit your product could bring.”
That interaction-based analysis can build a base for success, and Aethon is proof. On average, the 75-employee company has doubled its revenue annually since 2005.
Smart Business spoke with Zini about building relationships with potential customers.
Q. Initially, how do you get to know customers?
First and foremost, you want to understand their operation. You want to understand how they currently do what you want to help them with. Is what’s important to them that things get delivered within a certain time, or is the quantity of what’s delivered more important? How do they interact with the receiver?
You’ve got to talk to people. You’ve got to go visit the industry. At a previous company where we developed a pharmacy robot, I was in charge of selling that first robot. I went to a local hospital and I asked them if I could spend a couple weeks just sitting in their pharmacy and observing what they do. I’d talk to people; I’d watch what they do.
You have to listen to more than just one person. There are a lot of things that are common among [companies] but there are also differences. The mistake I’ve seen people make is they’ll talk to somebody who’s very credible, but they draw all their conclusions from that one interview. Then they try to apply it in other places and it doesn’t work. Don’t just take the word of one person.
Once you understand how they do it, then you can start saying, ‘Now, how about we do it this way or that way?’ You start exploring alternatives.
If you go in and try to tell them, ‘Here’s what we want you to do, and here’s how you do it,’ they’re going to say, ‘Well, they don’t even really know what I need from them. How can you come in here and start telling me what to do?’
So you’ve really got to develop that relationship and understand what they do. And then you can start talking to them about a new technology.
