Redefine Success

I met Sarah, an SVP of Finance at one of my customers, at a conference event I put on with a partner. Our conversation eventually made its way to my partner portfolio and we discussed the partner solutions her team used. One solution was dramatically underperforming in sales, so I asked her - what would make this product useful? She said something that still sticks in my head:

“We’ve been telling PartnerX for years that what they need is to integrate with Microsoft. I’ve worked at 4 different orgs and it’s the same everywhere. Their new features are cool, but we can’t use them until they start working with the other tools our teams rely on.”

A painful truth - new offerings usually miss the mark. It’s comfortable to think “this is a great idea and customers will love it.” When asked, the market will tell you what people think of your idea; if you listen, it can even tell you before you throw in the hours developing a product or service no one will buy.

Success is the metric organizations care most about, whether it’s on increasing revenue, decreasing costs, reducing risk, or expanding reach. The conventional wisdom feels like this is done from the organization’s perspective: it’s not. Value is defined on the customers terms.

Instead of going through the whole building process before you ever get feedback, frontload your new initiatives with discovery.

For this partner solution, instead of dumping money into the lowest common denominator of “AI features,” they could have built what customers were asking for.


Here are 7 examples of the customer pain-focused questions to ask before those investment dollars become sunk costs:

1. What pain do our customers feel today?

2. What specific people and role types feel this pain most?

3. How does this (feature/service/new product) address that pain?

4. What gaps do we have for addressing this pain?

5. What trends will shape the pain customers have?

6. How will we address pain today and as it evolves given the trends above?

7. What stories can we tell about this pain and how we solve it better than our competitors?
   
   

Whether at the start of the journey and asking these questions before you embark or these read like a list that would’ve been great 20 years ago, Dunham Listens is here to help. The right time to ask them is right now and we include questions like these in all our Partnerships Infrastructure engagements. Reach out today to see about getting started.

Question sheet to figure out if your new product addresses customer pains. If the answer is no - you can save money iterating before investing in something customers won’t buy.