So-called “organic growth” – which basically means building a business with your own internal resources – makes especially good sense in today’s tough economy. For many small firms that sell business to business, growing through debt financing just isn’t an option anymore.
Dan Adams, president of Advanced Industrial Marketing Inc. has spent his career helping companies that sell business-to-business products overcome obstacles that tend to stunt organic growth. If you’re like most small firms that sell business-to-business products, you may be making predictable mistakes that are inhibiting your ability to compete.
Here are some of the missteps that you can avoid:
• Imagining customer needs in a vacuum. At most businesses, the new product process begins with the word “idea.” But whose idea is it: yours or your customer’s? Unfortunately, most suppliers start with their own solution, not the customer’s. Then they try to validate it by showing it to some potential customers, and measure what they consider to be marketplace “need” by watching what happens when they launch the product.
• Relying on sales reps to capture customer needs. Salespeople alone are not the right ones to uncover what’s needed in the marketplace. That’s because they are usually rewarded for near-term selling and often can’t reach the true decision-makers anyway. Train all in advanced B2B interviewing methods and you’ll run circles around your competitors.
• Failing to research the market or seek customer feedback. Many small companies rely on prior knowledge or simply “gut feeling” when devising new products and services for the B2B marketplace. But these days, even small firms need to be much more sophisticated in their approach to determining true customer needs and “pain points.” One low-cost approach is to train yourself and all of your employees to routinely interact with customers for the expressed purpose of gathering intelligence about their needs. Sometimes the best information can come through casual comments.
• Using hand-me-down consumer goods methods. Traditional consumer-type research relies on surveys, questionnaires and interviews. That’s fine for consumer goods, says Adams, but B2B customers tend to be more measured and rational in their approach to purchasing, and they are far fewer in number. They’re smart and will make you smarter if you engage them in a peer-to-peer dialogue. Let them lead you to their areas of interest, probe with skill, and you’ll be shocked at how much you’ll learn. •
Daniel Kehrer can be reached at
editor@business.com.
