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Evaluate your Customer Needs

Guest post by: Joe Dager

Article Overview: How do you increase speed in your marketing? It actually is very easy. You must target your market. Most professionals lose jobs because they do not make their offers crystal clear to their prospect. The prospects must understand completely, without a doubt what benefits they will receive and what the outcomes will be from working with you or using your product. You must be crystal clear in your definition. However, are you crystal clear in what you will be offering?

Evaluate your Customer Needs

How do you increase speed in your marketing? It actually is very easy. You must target your market. Most professionals lose jobs because they do not make their offers crystal clear to their prospect. The prospects must understand completely, without a doubt what benefits they will receive and what the outcomes will be from working with you or using your product. You must be crystal clear in your definition. However, are you crystal clear in what you will be offering?

I have recently started using the Kano model in providing a better definition for my clients of putting their product and features not only perspective but defining that clarity issue. The Kano model relates to three factors:

Basic or must be or the expected needs. Without these the customer would be dissatisfied. This sounds very straight forward but if these are not adequately defined during the marketing process they are simply deal breakers and questions that either party may ever asked.

The second aspect is the performance factor and to define that performance think about the term, “more is better.” The more this performance is met, the more the prospect is satisfied. This is the area that the customer measures the value of the product or service they are receiving. In a few cases, these features are the ones that have meaning to some clients and others could care less. They even may cause dissatisfaction to some. Herein lays a great opportunity to improve these areas which many times can be done at relatively inexpensive option. Or, you may even be able to remove them completely for a few of your target segments. If you can, are these segments really your target customer?

Another way to leverage the performance factor segment is to have a better definition of your target market and how it relates to these factors. You may find that making these an option or even using them in a way of further segmenting your customer base may ultimately give you an advantage over the competition either through price or features.

The third factor is the delighters. If these are absent, they will not cause any dissatisfaction at all. The customer does not even expect these. But when they are there, they cause extreme happiness. OK, maybe that is a bit much. An interesting side note that needs to be recognized about the delighters is typically they do not increase the value in the product or the service. Seldom will you get paid more because of them. The delighters may also in time, even become a basic need. What is a delighter today, may be an expectation tomorrow. The Kano Model is constantly shifting but it is a great method to use to gain a better understanding of your prospects values that are critical to success and to prioritize the requirements for further development activities. Just as importantly, I think it really lends itself to understanding your market segment characteristics better. And if you divide your marketing segments better, you will increase throughput and develop better budgets as a result. By the way: Another important feature of the Kano Model is that it gives you a better understanding on what tradeoffs you might have in your marketing cycles. You certainly could not trade off a basic need, but you might be able to reduce the level of a performance factor.

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Article Tags: CTQ, CTS, Kano, Lean, Lean Development, Lean Marketing, Quality



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Re: What are your June Goals? - Nice Evan, congrats on your book draft Finish the goals I didn't finish in May - smiles I want to clean up my primary Gmail account Finish my new websites Continue my 3rd edition of 3 volumes or ..... many smaller new editions Lean more about Penguin Read/re-read a book a day Evaluate Kindle There you go; that is a start since I have never posted goals before
Re: Email marketing strategy - [quote="cathleen":1how8x8i]Here are the some steps you need to take to develop an effective e-mail strategy: Identify qualitative goals. Analyze the current situation. Complete a competitive analysis. Define the target audience. Determine which types of e-mail meet your needs. Develop a content strategy and a frequency and send schedule. Design the e-mail template. Create quantitative goals. Compile budget and ROI (define) projections. Evaluate results and tweak the strategy accordingly[/quote:1how8x8i] Nice tips, Cathleen. Is this something you do professionally?
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