Newsletter #4: New AIM Institute research on what drives new product success

Let me begin by describing our research: The AIM Institute conducted a survey (n=311) of B2B professionals, in which we queried them on 12 different voice-of-customer skills. We gave each VOC skill a name and description, such as…

• VOC skill name: Secure Interviews
• VOC skill description: Convince customers to let you interview them in order to understand their needs

For each of these skills, we asked survey respondents to answer two questions:

• How IMPORTANT is it that you are able to... (competency description here) on a scale of 1-to-10?
• How SATISFIED are you with your ability to... (competency description here) on a scale of 1-to-10?

We included qualifying questions that described the respondents and their experience in new product development. As a result, we were able to test for correlations… and we found strong correlations between all four of these factors:

So essentially, there was a strong correlation in everything we tested. This kept us busy creating charts… not surprising when you consider all the variables we captured in our qualifying questions (like size of company, type of product produced, level of VOC training, etc.). Many of the charts took on this format:

We focused quite a bit on the horizontal axis (VOC skills competency). This axis shows how respondents answered the question, “How satisfied are you with your ability to (competency description here).” We learned that those with strong VOC skills also said they had…

• Received extensive VOC skills training
• A good understanding of market needs
• Higher new product success rates

In another newsletter edition, we’ll show you where the 12 B2B VOC skills “landed” on the above matrix. (If you’re curious now, you can download the free report lower in this newsletter.) As you can imagine, we created charts for all sorts of respondent sub-groups:

• Large vs. small companies
• Those well-trained in VOC skills vs. those that weren’t
• Those with a “winning” new-product success rate vs. those that didn’t
• Those with a good understanding of market needs vs. those without

But for now, let’s just answer one question: How does your understanding of market needs impact your NPD (new product development) success rate?

We’ll use the next chart to sort this out. Let’s begin by looking at the legend in the chart below. The colors depict three groups of respondents:

• Green: New product success rate was above 50% (winning track record)
• Yellow: New product success rate was about 50% (average track record)
• Red: New product success rate was below 50% (losing track record)

Now check out the horizontal axis: This is how respondents assessed their typical understanding of customer needs in the markets they target for new product development.

You don’t see much green in the two left columns, do you? What’s this mean if your employees have a poor or very poor understanding of market needs? You should expect only about 5% of them to have a winning track record.

But what if these employees have a good or high understanding of market needs? It would be reasonable to expect over 70% of them to have a winning track record.

Granted, these data show correlation, not causation. But if you’re not happy with your new product success rate, don’t start hiring more R&D right away. Your easiest path to success might be to boost VOC skills to better understand customer needs.

In other words, let’s figure out what customers want before developing products for them. Such a radical thought, right? If you’d like to explore this research more, please download our complete (free) report.

In future editions of this newsletter, we’ll explore other aspects of this research, several of which we found quite surprising.

For now, I’d love to hear your impressions: Let’s start a conversation about how we can amaze customers with our new products. And reap rapid, profitable, sustainable growth for ourselves while we’re at it.

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About the author: Dan Adams is the founder of The AIM Institute, and author of the book, New Product Blueprinting, the blog, Awkward Realities blog, and the 50-video series, B2B Organic Growth. He is a chemical engineer with many patents and awards, including a listing in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Dan has taught his B2B innovation methods to tens of thousands of B2B professionals globally, lectured at many leading universities, and is a popular industry keynote speaker.