I recently wrote about how a one-time investment of $500 could help computer companies — and Adobe — sell thousands more units this year. What follows is a summary of the lessons all organizations can learn form that industry’s mistakes.
Lesson #2: There’s no substitute for continual, meaningful communication within your organization.
You can put down your Blackberries and iPhones and stop updating your Twitter feed for a moment. I’m not talking about constantly touching base. I’m talking about serious, focused, intense sharing about who your customers are and how they use your products and services.
I encourage all my clients to conduct something I call a Quarterly Convergence. This is a formal meeting that includes a representative of every department that touches your customer: sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, product management, channel marketing, billing, management,and your ad agency. We sit down with a full pot of coffee, a basket of bagels, and no cell phones, and talk about the customer: who they are, what they want, how they’re using the client’s products and services.
I won’t go into detail about how this works, but I will say this: the result is always enlightening and always helps the organization become more effective.
Very often, it also results in extremely rapid development of new products and/or markets. That’s because — imagine this! – your customers are under no obligation to use your products or services in they way that you intended. They come up with all kinds of innovative ways to use whatever it is that you sell. And when they do that, they frequently call your support lines, mention it to a sales rep, or post in an online review. In most organizations, that extraordinarily valuable intelligence goes nowhere. But if it’s shared, you can turn a hidden demand into sales.
Had the product teams from Sony, Toshiba, Apple, Adobe, HP, Intel, or any of the other players in my example been doing this, they would have instantly seen the value of providing the information that customers in this niche need to make a buying decision. And speaking of niche markets…See next post.
