My take away from Class: Customer-Driven Technical Innovation for Engineers
One of my friend from Graduate program in Energy System told me about this class on designing technical innovation around customers. He invited me to take one class and see if the course interest me. I thought, why not and went to attend the class. The instructor was prof. Eugene Buff and he brought very interesting ideas and perspective about technical innovations and sales.
I am planning to attend his classes and write down important ideas from his lecture for my future reference.
[Lecture 2: 17th Jan 2018]
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You never sell to Organization. You always sell to people.
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Your customer may not be your end user. You need to know who your customer is and sell the product.
Example 1:
You built this innovative new product that reduce the surgical death rate from 30% to 10%. You try to sell this new product to surgeon, but guess what!!! He still won’t buy it. Why? Because, No surgeon will admit that 30% of his patients die.
He would say,
I don't kill 30% of my patients. You statistic may speak for other surgeons. I am not one of them. I am very good at what I do. I don't need your product.You can’t sell it to surgeon although surgeon is the end user of your product. Your customer in this case is hospital in-charge person. You have to sell it to the hospital in-charge.
Example 2:
In the case of baby products, such as nutrition food or cloths, your customers are parents and those babies are end user. Again, you are selling to customers and not end users.
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If it is important problem than someone is also working on it. If no one is working on it than rarely it is something customer needs. When there is need of a solution, customers start working around it and something is always out there. So, when you are building a product which is already in market, that is a good thing. It says that there is a need of a solution.