Everyone wants to sell more, yet few ask what impacts it the most: deployment. I had a long overdue conversation to catch up with Richard Tripp this week. His “POV method” is the best process I’ve seen for refining & re-prioritizing product focus. It’s based partly on finding out the number one outcome that the majority of your actual paying customers care about. Tripp calls this group of customers a company’s “center of success”. To my knowledge, use of his process has been limited to software companies – mostly SAAS companies. It struck me during a long drive yesterday that it could be used to improve the sales of any team. Teams with a deployed service or shipped product might gain the most.
Involve the whole team
The not-easily-impressed folks might think “Wooo, talking to customers – that’s a super new idea” and they’d be missing the point. Having been involved in many such efforts over the years – my experience is that the POV method is different & better.
It’s different in part because it isn’t about a group of VPs sitting around pontificating about things they’re disconnected from. Why disconnected? Because most VPs no longer spend time customers in the trenches. Even if you’re a owner/VP now, you weren’t always one, so you know what I mean. It’s better for the entire team to discuss progress together rather than in a series of silo’d departmental conversations. When everyone hears from everyone who has data / experiences to contribute, a much richer, more complete picture is the result.
One of the outcomes is the reduction of the pain and suffering required to adopt a product / service and substantially shrink / simplify the timeline from payment to “we’re getting the benefit we paid for”. I remember years ago watching the discovery process unfold during the early stages of a POV conversation about a group’s (non-SAAS) product.
During the discussion, a normally quiet member of the service / deployment team who spent all of their time with customers during the deployment process blurted out something like “Do you have any idea how frustrating our installs are and how long it takes our customers to go live with our software? At least three months!!”
The product team’s reaction was shock and surprise, as you’d expect. Because management was part of the discussion, the project got immediate momentum. A substantial and cooperative joint effort between the product and the service departments to substantially pare down install / deployment challenges was the outcome – a small but high impact improvement.
Assembling a grill
Software deployment challenges are common, but deployment problems aren’t limited to software. The longer that the time-to-benefit period grows for any product or service, the easier it is for buyer’s remorse to take hold. If it takes 90 days to get your product or service producing, customers can lose sight of why they wanted the benefit.
It reminds me of buying a new grill, getting it home and putting it together.
If you’ve assembled a grill in the last 20 years, you know that the grill business needs some work. People buy a new grill because the old one finally rusted out, they need more capacity, or they’re having an event & need a bigger one. Most people don’t do this weeks in advance. They might buy the grill a day or two before the big event.
The likely result is one of those “It’s 10 pm on Christmas eve and I have toys to assemble” experiences. Instead of fitting together plastic parts, there’s sharp-edged sheet metal & screws that look alike but aren’t. Meanwhile, two people must hold the pieces in position so the third person can turn a few screws. Eventually, this pile of parts becomes something that will eventually cook a meal. Does it have to be this much trouble?
Imagine if the team(s) responsible for packaging, instructions, & parts watched consumers muddle through this process on a third floor apartment patio. Enlightenment is guaranteed. When a developer watches an end user use their software, it’s often painful because what seemed obvious almost never is.
Whether you make software, grills, or campers – your development, packaging, and deployment staff will learn important lessons simply by watching a few customers unpack, assemble, & deploy your product or service.
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