How do you get product enhancement requests? Do you look to competitors for new features or have an open product enhancement questionnaire posted on your website? Do you create product survey templates and survey customers or does your marketing team sit around a conference room coming up with product ideas with no outside input?
All of these are methods companies use when it's time for product upgrades. However, sometimes organizations spend a lot more time sitting around thinking about what would be cool and comparing their feature list to their competitors and not enough time looking to customers and prospects for what they want.
Surveying customers is not a requirement when it comes to listening to their needs at product enhancement time. You have employees on the front line talking to customers everyday, answering their questions, trying to help them create workarounds when features don't exist. You have a sales team talking to prospects daily, sometimes losing deals because your offering doesn't have a critical feature. Do you know what these deal breakers are?
A lot of times this type of information already exists within the organization, but it's not being shared between employees or pushed up to decision makers. My guess is this is due to the organization's culture. So how do you get the information that already exists? ASK employees who are talking to prospects and customers. If you just ask once and they don't give you a response because they don't know, they're probably not prepared - after all, you don't usually ask. You'll need to shift the culture. My best suggestion is to get them to pass the information on as they get it. That way, you don't need to worry about them forgetting a great product enhancement. An easy method to collect these new ideas, host something on your intranet - or create an online survey that only contains a few questions (maybe just one open text box). All the information will be collected in one place for whoever decides what the next product enhancement will look like.
Similar data can also be found, in some cases, in customer market research and customer satisfaction surveys. Depending on the goals of the survey (one should always be figuring out what you can do better), customers will tell you what you're doing wrong. And remember that additional comment box you should have in every survey questionnaire? Customers will write in the things they want if you didn't give them another opportunity to voice those through survey questions.
Looking at competitors and their product offering is important, but it doesn't matter if that's not what customers and prospects are looking for. Keep your ears open and listen to what customers are saying they want. They're using your product, they know where it's failing to meet their needs and how it could do a better job working for them. If you don't already have this information, consider creating a product survey to send to customers.
All of these are methods companies use when it's time for product upgrades. However, sometimes organizations spend a lot more time sitting around thinking about what would be cool and comparing their feature list to their competitors and not enough time looking to customers and prospects for what they want.
Surveying customers is not a requirement when it comes to listening to their needs at product enhancement time. You have employees on the front line talking to customers everyday, answering their questions, trying to help them create workarounds when features don't exist. You have a sales team talking to prospects daily, sometimes losing deals because your offering doesn't have a critical feature. Do you know what these deal breakers are?
A lot of times this type of information already exists within the organization, but it's not being shared between employees or pushed up to decision makers. My guess is this is due to the organization's culture. So how do you get the information that already exists? ASK employees who are talking to prospects and customers. If you just ask once and they don't give you a response because they don't know, they're probably not prepared - after all, you don't usually ask. You'll need to shift the culture. My best suggestion is to get them to pass the information on as they get it. That way, you don't need to worry about them forgetting a great product enhancement. An easy method to collect these new ideas, host something on your intranet - or create an online survey that only contains a few questions (maybe just one open text box). All the information will be collected in one place for whoever decides what the next product enhancement will look like.
Similar data can also be found, in some cases, in customer market research and customer satisfaction surveys. Depending on the goals of the survey (one should always be figuring out what you can do better), customers will tell you what you're doing wrong. And remember that additional comment box you should have in every survey questionnaire? Customers will write in the things they want if you didn't give them another opportunity to voice those through survey questions.
Looking at competitors and their product offering is important, but it doesn't matter if that's not what customers and prospects are looking for. Keep your ears open and listen to what customers are saying they want. They're using your product, they know where it's failing to meet their needs and how it could do a better job working for them. If you don't already have this information, consider creating a product survey to send to customers.
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