Laura Marie Reese - Align: Get Your Team on the Same Page, Discover Clients Needs, Develop Better Products

Understanding what customers want is neither easy nor obviousbut it is essential for all companies. In this guide, expert Laura Reese walks you through the pitfalls and possibilities of customer interactions. Focusing on business-to-business fields, she demonstrates how to run face-to-face meetings that solicit valuable feedback and shares simple techniques for unlocking meaningful insights into a clients needs.

You will learn how to cultivate an aligning mind-set within your company and among your own team by defining clear roles for each member. In addition to step-by-step guides for running customer alignment meetings, this book outlines specific skills for improving engagement with customers. Based on concepts of proven effectiveness, these tools will help transform a disparate group into a unified team of professionals working toward the same goal of discovering valuable customer insights.

Copyright

Copyright 2019 by Laura Reese

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

Align: Get Your Team on the Same Page, Discover Clients Needs, Develop Better Products is a new work, first published by Ixia Press in 2019.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reese, Laura Marie, author.

Title: Align : get your team on the same page, discover clients needs, develop better products / Laura Marie Reese.

Description: Mineola, New York : Ixia Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021717| ISBN 9780486816456 (hardback) | ISBN 0486816451

Subjects: LCSH: Customer relations. | Consumer satisfaction. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Customer Relations. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Management Science.

Classification: LCC HF5415.5 .R4354 2019 | DDC 658.8/12dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021717

Ixia Press

An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

81645101 2019

www.doverpublications.com/ixiapress

This book is dedicated to all those who would rather wing it when meeting with customers.

To you, I say, Read this book.

Contents

Preface

T HIS BOOK is based on my experiences directing the customer advisory board (CAB) program at Altera Corporation for more than a decade. Our company designed computer chips that went into various products, from Internet networking routers to high-end medical equipment. Quite independent of our specific products, the protocol we came up with for working with customers via the CAB program could work for any business-to-business (B2B) industry. It would be wise to set up procedures such as those we developed for any B2B company serious about setting long-range strategy. Getting information about challenges faced by your clients directly from the source will allow your team to anticipate client needs in a way that is true to reality.

It all started when my boss at the time, Robert Blake, complained that we seemed to be planning products by looking in the rearview mirror. He wanted us to stop looking backward and start peering into the future.

We agreed on our purpose straightaway: to align our product road maps with our key customers. We wasted no time and invited these customers to meet face-to-face with us at our headquarters in San Jose, California. In these forums, we strove to learn about their product road maps, with an eye toward developing goods they would want to buy in the future.

Understanding what customers want is neither an easy nor an obvious task. You cant simply throw a few customers and product planners in a room and say, Go! Theres more to it than simply asking, Hey, what do you want us to build for you? At least, thats what we came to learn after a few initial rocky meetings.

What we learnedthe hard waywas this: Engaging directly with customers can be fraught with pitfalls. Unintended expectations can be set, sore topics mentioned, or one might alienate the customers by talking too much, pitching unwanted products, or failing to listen. As it turns out, simply throwing a group of people in a room and seeing what shakes loose is a recipe for disaster. Even if those people have developed best-in-class skills as subject matter experts (SMEs in tech parlance), they might not be bringing to the table a terribly competent interpersonal game. Even if the SMEs are socially adept, if they come into the room unclear of their purpose or untrained in the techniques of uncovering customer needs, they could unintentionally scuttle the meeting.

Regarding SMEs: usually this term applies to specialized engineers, but Ill use it throughout the book to denote anyone with a highly focused knowledge base, whether it be in corporate accounting, patent protection, web marketing, or your own bailiwick.

Ive witnessed bright and highly valued SMEs face-plant fantastically in meetings. They attempted to uncover customer needs but hadnt been given any guidance. They werent to be blamed; they put their energy and focus into their specialties, not into customer-facing skills. So I shared with them simple, easy-to-remember techniques that made it effortless to interact with customers and hear insights that mattered, which they could use in developing products. I explained the various roles of each person on the aligning team, so the SMEs could know the right moments to contribute to the conversation.

Aligning with customers face-to-face is worth doing. To do it well requires planning, training, and focus. During my decade of running the customer advisory board program, my colleagues and I learned many lessons. I also gleaned knowledge from books and mentors. Ive included these insights here. My hope is that by sharing my experience, I can give you a jump start into uncovering customer needs successfully.

This book is for all people in businesses who want to understand their customers. Its geared toward supplier-to-manufacturer or B2B relationships more than, say, the relationship between a high-volume consumer goods manufacturer and its customers. That said, many of these techniques could translate to businesses where there is a lot of interaction directly with individual end customers.

In this book youll find:

ways to cultivate an aligning mind-set;

clear roles for each member of the uncovering team;

step-by-step guides for running customer alignment meetings;

specific skills for face-to-face engagement with customers;

example scenarios inspired by real experiences; and

tips for putting it all together.

Derived from concepts and skills that proved to be effective for us in the customer advisory board program, these ideas transformed us from a disparate group of individual amateurs to a team of professionals. I hope they can do the same for you.

Acknowledgments

I D LIKE TO THANK Robert Blake and Paul EkasPaul, for suggesting I write this book, and Robert, for asking me to put together something called a customer advisory board (CAB) program way back when. Both encouraged my work bringing product developers together with key customers to align our respective companies road maps.

Id also like to thank Rob Sturgill, Andy Turudic, Mike Hutton, and Dirk Reese (my husband), who kindly allowed me to interview them about their experiences being subject matter experts (SMEs) in customer meetings. Eva Condron has my gratitude for providing insightful feedback on many occasions.

Credit goes to Rory Clark for introducing me to active listening techniques, among other skills in his Focus Selling training. Bill Brown and Elena Meyers, both superbly skillful salespeople, provided feedback for my CAB program. George Papa, vice president of sales, supported the meetings by encouraging his teams to bring important customers in to talk with us factory folks.