"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." - Marcus Aurelius
"Why do customers buy our product?"
That's "the question" because the answer informs virtually every major business decision you face including strategy, price and positioning and choice of distribution channel. Worse still, it's not a question you can afford to ask just once because the answer changes over time as products and markets mature. Yet increasingly, companies turn to their sales force for an answer either because "sales people know the market the best" or "market research is ambiguous and costly."
There's just one problem - sales people usually provide the wrong answers.
In a business-to-business selling environment, otherwise smart, well-intended sales people can become an unwitting mouthpiece for manipulative customers who want to telegraph incomplete or misleading information to vendors. Those customers employ actors (a/k/a buyers) trained to extract price concessions from vendors, often by regaling sales people with exaggerated claims of product shortcomings, service problems and attractive offers from competing suppliers. Many sales people endure the drama without rebuttal hoping to escape with an order of any size or price.
There are valuable exceptions... sales people who enjoy "adult-to-adult" customer relationships can provide especially relevant market insight. Unfortunately those relationships are increasingly rare.
Positive product attributes always exist - customers buy your products for a reason. Yet in a selling context, the product and service attributes that customers value most will remain well-hidden and undiscovered. Customers have no incentive to disclose them, and sales people usually can't (or don't) engage in discussions that might reveal them.
How Snap Vector Can Help
First, let's address whether Snap Vector can help answer "the question." If the customer you're interested in is an individual consumer, we can't. But if your customer is another business, we can.
Within consumer markets, value-drivers - the reasons consumers buy - depend partly on psychological considerations that can be revealed through consumer research techniques. Although Cincinnati is home to world-class consumer marketing firms, Snap Vector isn't one of them.
But within B-2-B markets, customers value products and services mainly by economic impact - the effect those products have on the customer's revenues and costs.
Value-drivers for B-2-B products are best revealed in one-to-one "depth interviews" that Snap Vector is uniquely qualified to conduct. Depth interviews provide insights into which product and service attributes are valued by the customer, which aren't, and why. Often even "manipulative customers" will reveal the product attributes that really matter and how they compare to offerings from competitors.
These conversations can yield important insights to help guide individual relationships, but that's only a useful by-product. The real needle-moving value comes from the aggregate response of several customers (or prospects) to consistent inquiries. Taken together, those responses will often reveal hidden value drivers that can define market segments, inform Product Pricing and guide overall Business Strategy.
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