The faster you wanted to jump onto the drawing board and come up with a solution, the faster you’re going to let the customer down. Hold your step, take a deep breath, and hear the customer’s agony, not just once, again, and again until you capture all his perspectives. You know why? Every time he tries to explain to you the challenge, he would use a different anecdote, a new metric, and a real-world example of his business in helping us understand.

He isn’t just helping us understand, he’s trying to make us successful in building the next great product, giving us a 360-degree panoramic image of his business. As we know, he doesn’t hold mastery in photography, so the customer version looks something like this to us in our head…… (image went wrong)

Don’t re-invent, do research

Yes, this is what we have been waiting for, our greatest time and energy spent to extract this masterpiece out of the customer’s head. Now let’s roll up our sleeves and get into action. Place all the tools out of our coat pocket and bring in the best combination. Start with research, if you already know the exact industry jargon to specify this challenge, start your research on how others have been doing. If you don’t, don’t try to invent, research for the jargon or industry space that defines the problem and solution.

Once you get to know what it is called, read about case-studies of how others have been doing it, competitors who sky-rocketed and how were they able to do it. Explore market financial trends, industry attractiveness, customer willingness to pay, and investor affinity towards this space. Here comes the best part

Fail Fast

I believe the best way to find the product-market-fit is to walk down the wrong one as fast as we can, so we would have the time and opportunity to correct the course early in the game, saving a ton of time, money, and energy.

Do not wait for the big day, follow continuous release cycles – roll out, re-visit, refine and re-iterate, the faster you receive feedback from customers how useless our product is, the faster we would have the data to make it the next big thing.

Always start with customer

If you’re trying to build a B2B product company, every feature and functionality we incorporate should be a need the customer is willing to pay for and should have a direct business impact for your customer, either generating new revenue or saving current costs. Let me give you a small example from my experience, I was talking to a sales director(SD) of a B2B manufacturing company and he said, “Venkat, we need you to display the credit limit of a customer to sales personnel when a new order is being created”. I said yes, and asked how will this impact his business and I asked the same question twisted and turned to extract multiple dimensions, and here are the insights I received.

Me: How does it help your sales team?
SD: Displaying the credit limit of a customer helps sales personnel to evaluate customer credit health status and request orders accordingly.

Me: Do you think this will have any impact on your overall inventory?
SD: Yes, this will also help us optimize our inventory effectively, dispatch higher volumes of stock to good paymasters and avoid over stockage at bad paymasters.

Me: Who else do you think will also benefit from this feature?
SD: Displaying credit limit will provide insights to the director's office while approving and they shall assign follow-up activities to sales on outstanding dues

Me: Will this initiative help you to track sales performance?
SD: Despite poor credit limit, if a salesperson generates orders for customers, this would help management track sales performance and plug-in revenue leakages

Me: Do you think this will improve your overall profit margin?
SD: Finally, incorporating this process would decrease the bad debt significantly from the current rate of 7%-8% to 2%-3% on total revenue.

Yes, now we have a tangible, measurable, quantifiable value customer would be leveraging for accommodating the credit limit feature. Now, the solution you target shall have a financial impact on the overall business, by increasing the profit margin by 3%-4%. This is our product win. Solving a pain-point that has direct business impact and huge value.

To incorporate one single feature, look at the amount of time we got to spend, now verify this pain-point exists with other customers. Create a small infographic on this challenge and send out a quick survey to customers in the same vertical and validate your hypothesis and then make it a feature in your product. Until you complete this entire exercise and arrive at this feature is a value-addition, master the art of saying “NO” to the customer.