Don’t Sell; Enable Customers to Buy An enormous amount of damage has been done to the profession of sales, and capitalism in general, because business people often believe their objective is to “make a sale.” In most cases, that’s short-sighted and wrong. The very words “sales” and “selling” convey pushing something on someone, often something ...

How to Master Your Customers’ Experience Theodore Levitt taught us that “People don’t want to buy a ¼ inch drill; they want to make a ¼ inch hole!”  In other words, solutions (drills) are totally separate and distinct from true customer needs (making holes). For example:

Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys Are The Wrong Tool For Innovation While customer satisfaction surveys can yield a lot of useful information to improve current offerings for current customers, they cannot discover your best opportunities for innovation and growth. Here’s why:

There Really is Such a Thing as a “Bad Idea” How many times have you heard someone say “There’s no such thing as a bad idea?” This is a regularly stated before brainstorming sessions. Its intent is noble: to create a safe place for people to verbalize their ideas and to express their creativity. While ...

It’s Not a Creativity Problem Innovation enables companies to differentiate, establish competitive advantage, and drive revenue growth. So it isn’t surprising that nearly every executive wants their company to be innovative. When I ask executives how they are driving innovation, I usually hear how they are enhancing their employees’ creativity, such as:

The Customer Information That is Essential Marketers talk a lot about buyer and user “personas.” A persona is an example or archetype of a real person who buys or might buy specific offerings. Personas can significantly improve focus and decision-making because they provide marketing and new product development teams with a concrete focus. However, not ...

"Just do it." I love this Nike slogan. It conveys a can-do attitude that encourages me to stop procrastinating, get off the couch, and take action! But, just do what, exactly? Take what action? If you want to drive growth through innovation, how do you know where to focus and what to do? There a lot of companies "just doing it" and most of them are just failing! In many cases, entrepreneurs are wasting time and money pursuing the flawed approach of launching a minimally viable product and "failing faster" before they have clarified the market need. This is a huge waste of time if you don't know what the customer is trying to get done first. Let's take a look at how Nike is winning and what we can learn from them.

Many entrepreneurs and large companies have mistakenly assumed that Thomas Edison believed in failing faster to learn what customers want. Not true! He learned the folly of this approach early in his career. His thousands of experiments were done only after he validated the customers' needs. In the 2nd half of an interview with Forbes, Urko addresses this misunderstanding

Urko’s Forbes Interview #1: How to Validate a Market (First published in Forbes, Jan 8, 2013, by Gregg Fairbrothers and Catalina Gorla, Contributing Writers) We’ve been talking about market validation. So far we’ve argued why it’s really important and the value it can bring. But how do you do it? This week we spoke with ...

Eric Reis has created a movement with the publication of his book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Based on his experience with consumer software, he encourages entrepreneurs to launch "minimally viable products," run as many "experiments" with these minimally viable products as is possible to accelerate learning about what customers want, and thereby "pivot" to a value proposition that customers want. It sounds quite compelling until you realize that this entire approach is based on one of the great myths about innovation: that customers have latent unarticulated needs, needs that they cannot tell us.