Don’t Ask Your Customers What They Want When You Design A Product

One perennial question that startups – and even product managers of established companies – ask us while designing a new product is whether they should ask customers what they want. Our standard answer is NO! Only a services company asks customers what they want. When a product company does that, it can prove counterproductive – … Read more

3 Ways To Get Approvals For Case Studies From Reluctant Customers

In Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies, we saw when to use case studies and when not to. Let’s now assume that a technology vendor has reached a certain stage in the sales cycle when it is appropriate to use case studies. Building an inventory of ready-to-use case studies can be a challenge when … Read more

Just Because Customers Can Find Their Own Solutions Doesn’t Mean They Will

There’s lot of data in the public domain. Buyer 2.0 is Internet-savvy. So they will help themselves to all that information and find solutions to their pain areas by themselves. Ergo salespersons should stop trying to sell solutions to potential customers. This is the sum of essence of one prevailing school of thought in B2B … Read more

Payments Solutions Provider Bolsters Sales Appointments

Here’s our latest success story: Payments Solutions Provider Bolsters Sales Appointments Metrics-driven Campaign Management boosts Inside Sales performance While managing this Payment Solutions Provider’s marketing campaign, we noticed a sudden drop in volume of appointments set by its Inside Sales team. Among the reasons proferred to explain the problem were “holiday season”, “people are busy … Read more

Banks Will Know Chipotle Is Going Bankrupt Before Chipotle’s CEO

Following Chipotle’s e-coli scare late last year, the burrito chain’s stock has been on a free fall. From a peak of ~$750 in October 2015, the stock price plummeted to ~$400 at the height of the crisis last month. At the time, it was rumored that the company might be forced to file for bankruptcy. … Read more

Scoping Can Make Or Break A Deal

Whenever they’re asked to sweeten a deal, most vendors respond with a discount. They don’t have to. In Five Ways To Sweeten A Deal – Apart From Discount, we gave several alternative tactics for sweetening a deal without dropping the price. We illustrated some of them with our interactions with the following vendors: Acme Accounting: … Read more

How To Really Kill Cash

They said cash is costly. It didn’t work with merchants. They launched one mobile wallet after the other to drive cashless behavior. It didn’t work with consumers. They scared people away from currency notes, claiming they contain all kinds of germs, bacteria and viruses. It didn’t work with anyone. Today: 85% of world’s transactions happen … Read more

IT Company Creates Product From Services

Here’s our latest success story: IT Company Creates Product From Services Product management delivers manifold value from IP assets During the course of 10+ years of its existence, this IT company had created a midsized services business. While executing engagements in a few select domains, the company had gathered massive expertise and built proprietary frameworks … Read more

Panic Not If Your WordPress Images Fail To Enlarge

Content marketers rarely find the space to squeeze in full size versions of images in the body of their content. Therefore, it’s customary for them to include a smaller size of the image within their (online) whitepapers, blog posts and other marketing collateral and leave it to readers to click the images to view them … Read more