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.

Here’s the rub though – if I wasn’t mostly happy with the product (I like their online banking, iPhone app, high-interest accounts, credit card link, global access, etc. etc.), I’d be out of there faster than you can say “bank run.” So, a few things to learn:

• Once you have a good product in place, set up switching costs to make your customers stay around longer.
• Get your customers who are using only one aspect of your product to use as many as possible. If they are not getting the full benefit, it will be easier for them to leave.
• If you feel like you are at a point in some business cycle where your customers are more likely to leave, perhaps you should give them an add-on product for free or at a discount (ahem, Citibank). ;-)

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that ‘the crowd knows’ better than any individual expert. Especially if three conditions are met: Diversity, Independence, and Decentralization. On TechCrunch, readers work in different capacities for a diverse set of companies – but they’re probably all working in the tech industry. Most bloggers are making a relatively independent decision to write a post and link it to TechCrunch, and there’s no overarching authority over bloggers. Whether or not TechCrunch’s audience meets James’s requirements can be debated, but there’s some chance we can trust this data. Or is there? Let’s see the results:
I wrote a script to get the top 20 stories in terms of trackbacks since the dawn of TechCrunch time until around the Apple iPhone post:

1. Exclusive Screenshots: Google Calendar (365 trackbacks)
2. AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data (246 trackbacks)
3. Google Has Acquired YouTube (202 trackbacks)
4. Completely Unsubstantiated Google/YouTube Rumor (186 trackbacks)
5. The State of Online Feed Readers (185 trackbacks)
6. The Online Storage Gang (143 trackbacks)
7. Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary (135 trackbacks)
8. PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul (128 trackbacks)
9. Comparing The Flickrs of Video (97 trackbacks)
10. Google Calendar is Live (95 trackbacks)
11. Digg Does The Acquisition Dance With News Corp. (93 trackbacks)
12. Digg 3.0 To Launch Monday: Exclusive Screenshots and Stats (91 trackbacks)
13. AOL-Netscape Launches Massive “Digg Killer” (90 trackbacks)
14. Yahoo.icio.us? – Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us (84 trackbacks)
15. Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist) (83 trackbacks)
16. Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches (82 trackbacks)
17. Bill Gates On The Future Of DRM (80 trackbacks)
18. AllPeers Is The FireFox “Killer App” (79 trackbacks)
19. Comparing the Mapping Services (72 trackbacks)
20. Facebook Users Revolt, Facebook Replies (71 trackbacks)

I’ve bolded the ones that I think deserve attention, but I wouldn’t say this creates a perfect list. First of all, I can’t see how Google Calendar would beat out AOL opening its doors or Google buying YouTube – unless maybe, just maybe, people are desperate for a worldwide MS-Exchange-like system and we thought this would be the end-all be-all. More likely, there are many prolific bloggers working at Google who read TechCrunch. Second, the prominence of “The State of Online Feed Readers” and Digg articles leads me to believe that the people ‘voting’ with these trackbacks are not very diverse. Finally, AllPeers?

Nevertheless, we do see some of the bigger tech stories of 2006 represented here: the YouTube acquisition; Digg, Del.icio.us, and ‘web democracy;’ AOL opening its walled garden, and the immaturity of DRM. It would be interesting to run this script on some other blogs and see what happens… perhaps on another rainy day.