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 Customer-Focused Recovery
Now that we are in the doldrums of the biggest downturn of our lifetimes, what can a technology company do to improve business? Hopefully if you were forced to reduce expenses, you focused on stretching or reducing engineering/development dollars and kept commission based sales people happy with investment in generating more leads. Reductions in customer service can be fatal as you what your existing customers to stick to you. It may seem like sacrilege to suggest slowing innovation or extending the milestones for development, especially for those deeply technical companies and/or founders. At the risk of offending engineers and developers, I hope you kept the sales and marketing folks around. This is the time to take great value propositions for customers that focus on reducing cost to market with a vengeance. You can clobber your competition right now with better marketing if you built your product around customer needs.
From the very beginning, a technology company needs to be about solving customer problems. Skilled, experienced product managers, essentially customer-facing engineering staff, are the best people to have on board early on in a company. In fact, start-ups almost require deep domain expertise in product management. Take Delta-Q Technologies for instance. The Burnaby-based manufacturer of industrial and automotive battery chargers had two founders: Rob Cameron (the power electronics technology genius) and Ken Fielding (the customer facing product manager). They mapped out a ten year path to electrification of industrial off-road vehicles and eventually the passenger car. But most importantly, they saw a huge glaring customer need for smaller, more efficient chargers that they knew how to build cost-effectively. Every step of the way, the company has focused on customer needs and customer service. The reward is that they are the top supplier of chargers in the target markets they mapped out in 1999 with nearly 400,000 chargers in the field since the first sale in 2003.
Here’s the key point about Delta-Q: They did not build a new gadget with tons of intellectual property. They built a better mousetrap based on tons of research on what the customer wanted. The company’s DNA is not to amass patents, but to win and keep business. Their sales team is top-notch and their product management bench is very deep.
In a down market, I would bet on the team and the company that has set the customer needs ahead of all else.
By Brent Holliday, Technology Practice, Capital West Partners. Brent can be reached at: brent@capwest.com
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