Pittsburgh-based NOMOS Corporation, whose innovative radiation therapy system is now emerging as the cancer treatment of choice, sells its advanced hardware and software to major hospitals. Radiation oncologists – the doctors empowered to prescribe NOMOS’ pricey equipment to those hospitals – were always considered the company’s most important customers, and shown great deference. 

But according to Medrad’s Paul Miller, a former member of NOMOS’ original team, there was a problem. Among those doctors, the company’s idea for an integrated family of treatment planning, imaging, and therapeutic tools was perceived as taking power away from physicians by turning more and more decisions about patient treatment over to computers. “The doctors really didn’t want that problem solved. If we listened to the voice of the customer, NOMOS would have gone away in two years. It’s a great product, and if you’re a small, innovative company, you can’t rely on interviews with the customers,” he said, “they’ll talk you right out of a good idea.” 

To BodyMedia’s VP of Product Development, Suresh Visnubhatla, a veteran of technology product development, listening to customer user groups may be particularly valuable for companies that already have a recognized product in an established market. In fact, if they’re run imaginatively, user groups not only come up with key requirements for future product models and releases, they can also collectively help to prioritize them. But there are limits. “The flip side is with a brand new product, you have to rely on your own company a lot more to generate the requirements. Eighty-five percent of what we do with our customers now has come from us,” he said, citing the BodyMedia’s experience introducing wearable biosensors to a new, and as yet largely unformed, consumer market. 

Caveat Vendor 

Wariness in listening to customers takes other forms as well, according to many of the PSN roundtable participants. For example:

The economic buyer – typically an executive charged with deciding whether there is a business case for purchasing the product – is rarely the product user. So while it’s important to solve the actual user’s problems, if you don’t solve the economic buyer’s problems and build his/her requirements into your design, your sales cycle can stretch out much longer, and yield far less satisfactory results, than otherwise.

In some cases, there are multiple layers of buyers, customers, and decision-makers – each with a different agenda – all of whom have to be pleased before a sale. With Vocollect, the maker of voice-directed computer interface systems used in warehouse operations, these typically include the vice president of operations, the company’s IT people who are responsible for installing and managing the system, and the plant floor workers who actually wear the headset and interact with the database. Any break in the chain of consent can thwart a sale. 

Even people who have a significant customer contact can come away with conflicting impressions, depending on the background they bring to into the meeting. That can lead to incompatible sets of requirements and differing priorities. Marcie Weinstein, Akustica’s product manager, was trained as an engineer. “I’ve been out with my sales guys, visiting customers, and we can sit in the exact same meeting and hear two completely different messages,” she said. 

Sales representatives can be a particularly unreliable source of information about customer priorities, several participants noted, not so much because of character flaws, but because their sales presentations are rarely in step with overall corporate product strategy. According to product manager Mike Capsambelis, sales people aren’t even allowed into meetings when requirements for the company’s data control solutions are being discussed. “Sales guys are not trustworthy in this area at all; they’re trying to make deals and they think they’re losing deals to some guy who’s got features nobody really cares about. So you have to be really careful on the software side.” To Vocollect Sr. Product Manager, Ken Kolenick, there is also the related danger of oversell. “One of the things that kills software companies is that the sales guy comes back and says ‘I sold a million dollar deal; we’ve got one year to build it.’ But it turns out to be a $3 million project that takes 2½ years to build. So you’re happy he won the deal, but when you have to roll it out, you cross yourself.”

Even when you do go to your customers, you have to handle it cautiously, according to SmartOps VP of Product Management, Cliff Isaacson. “You have to manage customer expectations very carefully or else they’re going to think that everything they say they want will be in the next release.” What it means is that if you’re careless, you’ll be setting them up for disappointment, even if you bring a much better product to market.