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:

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:

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 ...

Keeping the End in Mind I recently flipped through an old copy of the book with the understated title, “Successful Large Account Management,” by Miller, Heiman with Tuleja.  The opening to the chapter on setting strategic goals is so good and relevant to creating value for customers, I wanted to reprint it here verbatim.

R&D Investment Does NOT Equal Innovation “Every year since 2005, Booz & Company has conducted the Global Innovation 1000 study, which investigates the relationship between how much companies spend on R&D and what their overall financial performance is—and every year, the study reinforces the conclusion that there is no statistically significant relationship between the two.” ...

Marketing Malpractice is Preventable According to researchers at John Hopkins University, the biggest mistake doctors make is misdiagnosing patient problems. It’s estimated that misdiagnosing errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 people each year and resulted in nearly $39 billion in malpractice claims paid out from 1986 – 2010. While “misdiagnoses ...

The Purpose of Business “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” – Peter F. Drucker  Creating and keeping a customer is only possible if you are satisfying a customer need better than other competitive options. Innovation and growth requires understanding the customers’ needs in order to deliver superior value. It’s hard ...

Growth Strategy Made Simple Through Innovation Study after study has shown that the key to successful innovation and growth is having a clear understanding of customers’ unmet needs to guide the innovation process. Yet many leaders struggle with how to differentiate, innovate and grow because they don’t know which of their target customers’ needs remain ...

The Only Hope For Sustained Growth Do you want to be the master of your technology for which you will seek markets, or do you want to be the master of your markets for which you can create customer-satisfying solutions?

First, Define the Problem “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes finding the solution.” – Albert Einstein