Fearless Growth™

The Company knows all. We don’t need Voice of the Customer. Since customers really don’t know what’s possible, let’s have the R&D team push the envelope with new and derivative concepts and products, and then have marketing and sales convince the customer of what they really need. [...]

Can effective Voice of the Customer (VOC ) be gathered at a trade show? By all means, the answer is yes. But VOC collection needs to be planned, and needs to follow the basic rules for the research method that you’ll employ at the trade show. [...]

Customer engagement by senior team members in a sales development support role is invariably helpful. It conveys a top level commitment to customers by meeting customers on their own ground. Often, long term relationships are fostered by these visits, and they help to accelerate the sales cycle. While customer visits are positive, just visiting does not constitute gathering Voice Of The Customer (VOC). [...]

A favorite way to gain Voice of the Customer (VOC) for new and derivative products is to have engineers visit key customers. My issue is that many B2B companies rely too heavily on a few interactions between engineers and customers, and they use this narrow input to justify products, to determine key product-related attributes, and to gauge overall market acceptance. [...]

This is the first in a series of ten posts that explore my deep concerns about the effective application of Voice of Customer (VOC) research in B2B [...]