Gain an understanding of the marketplace. It’s through analysts, basic research and then talking to your customers.
Sometimes companies get caught up in thinking they know better and they know the problems that need to be solved without really doing very good market research or without talking to their customers enough. It’s really important to understand not what you think your customers want but really knowing that by having those conversations with your customers.
We’ll just start off with very open-ended questions like, ‘What are your problems?’ Not even asking about our particular area but just very high-level, top-of-mind: ‘What are you thinking about? What keeps you up at night? What are your greatest challenges?’
And then, based on that, start to bore in and even ask, ‘What vendors do you look to for solving those kinds of problems?’ As you get answers, get a little more specific. Customers are usually very open to telling you about other vendors they’re working with or problems that no one has solved for them yet. That can actually help in your product strategy, as well. I’ve learned about a number of really interesting new areas, things that we didn’t even get from analysts, just purely off of customers telling us about shortcomings they had with other vendors. So the customers give you a more real-world perspective, not just the marketing spin that the analysts are hearing.
Position yourself to meet those needs. You have to be careful so it’s not looked at as the sales guy looking for a sale. It’s multiple meetings with different people. That highest level meeting might be with myself or a chief technology officer or possibly head of marketing; basically, you’re just in there information gathering.
Then if you think there’s specific opportunity for the company, you’ll follow up — maybe myself but probably with the head of worldwide sales — where we start to bring in people that are more on the solution side of the business.
Customers don’t mind you selling to them if you have a solution. But there does need to be a separation between the process of information gathering for purposes that are not specifically related to a sales process, and then the sales process itself.
Decide which needs you’re capable of meeting. I would bring it back to [the executive staff] and say, ‘Here’s what we have found,’ and just open discussion up to the whole group, which will typically then lead to some assignments of tasks. We’re going to say, ‘OK, we need to now go prove out these two things. So you, vice president of marketing, go talk to XYZ analysts and ask their opinion on this. And you, head of my deployment services, go talk to three other customers and tell them what our point of view is on this and get their feedback on that.’
Then, based on that, we may make the determination, ‘OK, we now need to make a change in our product strategy,’ or, ‘In the upcoming releases of our products, we need to start moving in this kind of a direction,’ or, ‘We should go look at an acquisition in this particular area because it would take us way too long to develop ourselves into that space.’
How to reach: E2open Inc., (650) 645-6500 or www.e2open.com
