Darryl.net

I was chatting with my friend Chris Harrick a few weekends ago about B2B vs. B2C. He has been working at SugarCRM for a while (B2B) while I was at PlayFirst (B2C) before joining RightScale (B2B). He had a few good B2B tips from his experience there, but one that struck me in particular was “don’t just build the thing that the last customer you talked requested.”

In a consumer company, you’re usually talking to groups of people – either through a survey, in a focus group, or via a series of forum posts. Through this, you get a good sense of what is requested by most of your customer base vs. what just a single person is requesting. While it’s much easier to call up a customer in a B2B company (or perhaps they called you with a burning request), you should make a concious effort to avoid the recency effect.

Here are some potential ways to do so:

• Keep a common list of questions you ask every customer and take notes. Later, you can go back and scan the answer to one question across multiple customers.
• Um, surveys. Yup, these work in B2B too. In fact, define your customer lifecycle flow and stick a short survey at each step of their evolution.
• Keep a wish list that acts like a pareto chart. When you hear a request, scan this list and give the request an extra tick if it is there, and add it to the bottom if it is not. Every once in a while, sort by count. Have your sales team do the same.
• Get 12+ of your customers who are attending your next industry conference to sit down with you for an hour and tell you about their experience. Since they are probably thought leaders, ask them what they’d like to see next. Bring your wish list to add tickmarks to.

Overall, just avoid the temptation to add something to the backlog because a customer just asked you for it. Seems obvious, but it’s hard in practice.