Dan Adams, Founder and President of The AIM Institute

Speaker A: Hello and welcome. I'm, um, Steve Lachance, and this is a Faster Horse podcast, an innovator's guide to customer discovery. You've just found a mix of innovation insights and customer discovery. How to's all brought to you by the Searchlight. Dan Adams, president of the AIM Institute. Welcome.

Speaker B: Hey, thanks, Steve. Good to be here.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And it is our pleasure. Uh, I'm wondering if we could jump right into this. Where you could start with sort of the who, the what, the when, and the where of the AIM Institute and Dan Adams, and then we'll get into the why a little bit later on.

Speaker B: Sure, be glad to. So, uh, we formed the AIM Institute back in 2005. I had been working inside of industry for about 29 years. My background is chemical engineering, and I went over the dark side of marketing, uh, after a few years. And, um, you know, we were doing some things inside of industry that were really seeming to help with new product development. So when we started up the, uh, AIM Institute, our mission was to train engineers and marketing folks and technical people how to understand their customers needs, uh, and very specifically, B2B companies. So we really just work for B2B companies. We train their people how to go out and interview their customers so they can develop better products. That's essentially the business we're in.

Speaker A: Excellent. You mentioned in there a couple things that you said. Engineers and, you know, technical people. Technical folks. Uh, and then you also mentioned B2B. If we could start with engineers and technical folks. Why. Why that group as opposed to.

Speaker B: Yeah, so. And I should have said marketing also. So if we do a workshop, we might have maybe 25 people we're training. Now. The company we're working for is going to be a company that sells other companies. So it's going to be a DuPont or a Dow or a GE or somebody like that, and they're selling to other companies. Now what happens is these, um, engineers and marketing people and these very sophisticated, let's say it's dupont, very sophisticated professional people. They're going out and they're having a lot of contact with customers at other companies. But what they're often struggling to do is really understand the needs of those customers and in depth. So we've developed a lot of methods to help them truly understand the unarticulated needs, uh, in great depth so they can develop better products. Some people call it the fuzzy front end, Steve. You know, the front end of innovation. That's where we, uh, help people out.

Speaker A: I'm glad you said that. Fuzzy front end Help me, help me understand, uh, more about that. What's fuzzy, what's front end? Sharpen up the fuzziness, if you could.

Speaker B: You betcha. So think about product development in three phases. The first phase is typically called the front end. It's trying to figure out, you know, what should our new product look like, who should we be selling it to, you know, those kind of broad concepts. Historically, that area has been very fuzzy and people don't understand what they're supposed to be doing in that area. Now the second phase, the call, the product development phase. This is where companies go into the recesses of their laboratory and they push back the frontiers of, uh, modern science and create wonderful new products or services as well. The third phase would be the launch phase. When we launch this, uh, another way of thinking about it. If some of your listeners are in marketing, uh, and I spent a lot of time there, I used to tell people there were two purposes of marketing. I'd say there's early stage marketing, which is figuring out what customers want. Now that would be the front end. And I tell them there's late stage marketing, which is, you know, blowing up the balloons at the trade show. That's the launch page. So when we talk about fuzzy front end, it's the stuff that should happen so that when your, uh, engineers and chemists and technical people start developing product, they should know exactly what that product design is, and they should have complete confidence that what they're working on is something customers will love. And typically that's not the case today.

Speaker A: Well, tell me, how do you see the current state of how things are done today?

Speaker B: Well, it's been interesting. We've had the privilege of working mostly with Fortune 500 companies all around the world, and we have yet to come into a company and not seeing this being quite common. And that is companies come up with their own ideas of what they think customers will want. And either they do no serious interviewing. It's called voice of customer. Either they don't do it at all, or the voice of customers more to validate the ideas they already have. Now, there's a thing called confirmation bias. And confirmation bias means I kind of got a perception of the world, so I'm going to actually seek out information that confirms what I already thought to be true. You see this in political parties all the time today, right?

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: It happens in product development too. I think customers will want this. And now we go validate it. So what we train these very sharp professionals at the supplier company to do is forget their Ideas, It's OK if they've got some cool ideas, but when they go in these interviews, it's all about the customer. And so we're looking for ideas that the customer generates. We call these customer outcomes and we suppress our supplier solutions in the front end. Um, and we focus on the customer's outcomes and we have a way of kind of figuring out what those outcomes are that we should be working on.

Speaker A: Interesting. So when you say, if I think about the three phases you mentioned earlier, front end development, launch, is it fair to say that you'd characterize the current status of developments actually happening first, and then some form of maybe misused front end is coming second, and then there's a launch which is sort of fraught with risk, uh, and certain nodes.

Speaker B: Okay, that's right. People, uh, they kind of, they focus on that development stage and they kind of maybe mingle in a little voc, but it's kind of backwards, just as you said. Mhm.

Speaker A: Why do you think that is?

Speaker B: Well, I think there is an element of B2B has been following B2C. Here's what I mean by that. If you look across the country at B schools, business schools, you're going to find a huge amount of teaching on B2C. Um, you're going to have people showing up at Procter and Gamble that have gotten their M, bachelor's and master's degree in marketing. But it's B2C marketing. There's only a handful of colleges that really focus on B2B. Penn State would be one rare example. So what happens in the B2B world is this. If you're in marketing, there's a very good chance that the reason you're in marketing is that you were an engineer or a chemist or maybe a salesperson. Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said, tap, tap, Steve, poof. You are now in marketing. Congratulations. And uh, poor Steve. He hasn't had any serious B2B marketing training. The only real marketing out there. And if you look at these conferences, front end of innovation, conference after conference, it's steeped in B2C techniques. Let's come back to your question. If I'm in B2C, if I'm proctoring Gamble and I want to, um, learn how my customers will wash their laundry or clean their floors, you know what, I'm probably a lot smarter about that category, laundry or floor cleaning, than they are. So I'm going to have to guide them. I'm going to have to watch them like Jane Goodall's chimps On the hillside. I'm going to have to ask the right questions. I'm in charge. I'm the one coming up with ideas right now. Think about B2B. Totally, totally different situation. If I'm making an ingredient that goes into, um, bridge construction paints, for instance. Okay, well, my customers, they know so much more about the needs of, uh, bridge paints than I do. I'll never be able to keep up with them. If I make, um, a hose, and I'm talking to a Caterpillar engineer about their hydraulic hose on a bulldozer, they know way more about low temperature, flexibility and durability and the type of ingredients that are going through the hose. They know way more than I do. So what we need to do is now put ourselves in a position of humility as the B2B supplier, and we have to figure out how to make Those really smart B2B people transfer their knowledge to us. And that really hasn't been done, frankly, um, outside of the work we've been doing, uh, in this, when we sit

Speaker A: down or when we maybe doesn't involve sitting, how does that transfer of knowledge take place from our B2B customers to our marketing seat?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. If I can, let me mention one other thing I forgot to add, uh, just to kind of clarify this. B2B versus B2C. And then I'd like to address your excellent question. A great way of comparing B2B versus B2C is this. Imagine we make hose. Now, on one hand, we got a division that makes, uh, garden hose for consumers, and on another hand, we've got division that makes hydraulic hose, again for that Caterpillar bulldozer. Now, think about how deep your conversation can be with the homeowner versus the Caterpillar engineer. And think about five areas. First, knowledge. Well, we would have to say that the Caterpillar engineer has much more knowledge about their hose than the homeowner does. Then interest level. Uh, I'm not that interested in my garden hose unless I run over with a lawnmower. But if I'm a Caterpillar engineer, you could make me a hero at work by helping my bulldozer be much better. Help me save money, improve my process. Next area is objectivity. I might be influenced by the color of the hose if I'm a homeowner. But in the case of B2B, I've got to make rational decisions. I'm being held accountable for them. There are multiple people making decisions. I've got to follow procedures much, much more objective. Next area is foresight so in the case of, um, the Caterpillar engineer, they know they're in business to make money, so they can tell me, the supplier of hoses, how to save money, save manpower, increase throughput, and so forth. Finally, industry concentration. There may be millions of homeowners who are buying garden hose, but there's a limited number, which means I can get at them. Sorry for that long winded intro. But what this means is the stage is set for a very, very rich conversation. Essentially, we do it in two rounds. First, we do a qualitative discovery interview with several companies that are using hydraulic hose for earth moving equipment. And then we go back and we do a quantitative interview with the same customers. But two rounds of interviews get the job done.

Speaker A: Thank you for setting the stage. And it was very important to help understand. And, uh, from the hose perspective, I'm on more of the customer side. I kind of went to Home Depot and thought, well, this one's long enough and it's cheap enough and how often do I really use it? So there's less on the line, less risk, so to speak. And you mentioned there that you set up and two conversations take place. There's a first part, a second part. If we could focus on that qualitative part, because I think that's where things are typically more fuzzy. If we can, if we're still on the fuzzy front end, I imagine, how should that be approached? And you mentioned that you're not seeing it really anywhere, uh, out in the wild, unless someone's been kind of already trained to do it. Can you talk to me about either the value or the rarity of this, or.

Speaker B: Yeah, let me, uh, describe what it would look like. So let's say we're from the hose company. We would send a team of two or three people out to Caterpillar. We'd have a moderator. They guide most, ask most of the questions. We'd have a note taker. Now, this part seems a little weird, but our note taker would take their laptop and a digital projector or use the customers. And we're actually going to project our notes during the interview. And we're going to have what looks like little pre em sticky notes up on the screen. Uh, and then the third person will be an observer who can also ask questions and help out with everything. Now, on the customer side, who do we have there? Well, we try to get several job functions. Maybe we'll have the engineer there, maybe we'll have the operations person, maybe the marketing person. And what this is going to feel like to the customer is like a brainstorming. It's going to feel like we, this hose supplier, are facilitators and we're saying, what kind of problems are you guys having with your hose? So imagine this. The customer says, well, you know, we're having some problems with, uh, uh, flexibility of the hose at low temperature. Okay? So the note taker types that up in this sticky note. Then we start probing. When do you see that? How often does that happen? You know, how does that impact you? Could you describe what happens? So we're probing on that sticky note and then when we feel like we understand low temperature flexibility, we say to the customer, what else? And then they tell us the next thing that's bothering them. Well, we're having some abrasion resistance with the hose. Oh really? When does that happen? How do you notice that? And we probe on that. And so there's really a couple of things happening, Steve, in this Discovery interview. One is we're getting it up on a screen so customers can correct us if we're getting it wrong. The second is after we finish probing an outcome which is kind of like, you know, it's kind of like a need or um, um, it's something the customer wants to have happen. Okay, End result. But once we're done getting through, you know, abrasion resistance, we say, good, what else? What are their problems? And when we do that, the interesting thing is we have absolutely no idea what the customer is going to say next. They may talk about needing a smaller diameter hose or something else. And they begin to sense subconsciously that this isn't an interview being driven by the hose supplier, it's actually being driven by them. They're guiding it. They're deciding what the next thing is. They're correcting us. And because of that, the customers get much, much more engaged than if you take in your list of 20 questions.

Speaker A: I see, see now there's a couple clarification questions I have. The first is you use the term we now, you know, we go to the customer, uh, we project in practice. Is the we the AIM Institute or is it the individual companies and the individual organizations who are deploying with the AIM Institute? Uh, teaches, provides.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for clarification. We're really in the business of, uh, teaching people to fish. So, uh, it's very rare that we go on an interview. Uh, 98% of the time when I say we, it's really our clients are going out. So remember I said you might have a workshop. Let's say you had A workshop of five teams, each working on a different project, basically a different market segment. Each team's got a little bit of marketing, a little bit of technical, maybe a salesperson on it. Now, of that five person team, they'll select two or three to go on an interview, and they'll go out and do maybe six to 10 discovery interviews for maybe three months, and then they'll go back. And we haven't gotten to the quantity, but they'll go back and do it. So, yes, uh, good clarification. The we is our client.

Speaker A: The greater we understand, the greater we, the royal we. Now, the process as you're describing, um, lives, uh, under a larger name that I'm familiar with, new product blueprinting. I'm honestly not sure if we've mentioned it yet. Let's pretend that Steve at the Searchlight is, uh, keep it the hose industry. We're sitting there, we're talking to our client, Caterpillar or whoever might be purch our hoses. And you mentioned that we're driving at problems. Uh, we're trying to get to the problems. But I feel that there's some bridge between problem to outcome. You mentioned we want to get to outcome. Am I misunderstanding it, or is there a bridge there that we haven't picked up on in this conversation?

Speaker B: No, it's very good. I kind of oversimplified it. There's actually five parts to discovery interview. Uh, now, the first part we call current state here you actually do go in with your question. But here's the key. It's only two or three, and it's only to warm up the customer and get them feel comfortable. You might ask Cadfield, could you tell us what you feel your major strengths are versus competition? Something really easy to warm them up. Okay. Then you move into the second mode. And here we have little yellow sticky notes up. And that is the problem. And you say, so what kind of problems are you having? Now when they talk to you about abrasion resistance or the diameter of the hose, or the low temperature flexibility, or the pressure rating, we would actually call all of those outcomes. Those are outcomes that they want to have improved because it's a problem. So let's say they finally run, they give you 15 of these sticky notes and you say, is there anything else that's a problem? No, I don't think so. Now you move into step three. Okay, great. Now, is there something that maybe isn't a problem, but you'd love to see in your ideal world? Oh, yeah, you know, we're Trying to do some lightweighting because we're moving to electrification and want to lower weight. If you could make that hose lighter weight, that'd be really cool. Now that's still an outcome. We just got there in a different way. Instead of getting there from a problem, we got there from an ideal state. Those, uh, are up in the green sticky notes. Now we move to the fourth area. If there's time, we might show them a, uh, trigger map. We might show them major trends. Look at here are the demographic, technological and other trends that we see in this industry. Does that prompt or trigger any more ideas? Oh, yeah, Demographics. Operators are getting older. They can't have as much force. So we need. Who knows what they're going to come up with. Right. That's just more outcomes. They go up on blue sticky notes. The last part of the interview is top tips. Mr. Customer. I see we've got 30 sticky notes up here. Problems, ideal state triggered ideas. If you could snap your fingers and have five to 10 of these taken care of, what would be your top picks? And then we'll mark those. And that is the end of the interview. And, um, what we want to do now at the end of the interview is have 5 to 10 of their outcomes that they are most enthusiastic about seeing. We will roll those into all the other construction equipment interviews and that will help us prepare for the quantitative interviews which are round two.

Speaker A: Thanks, Dan.

Speaker B: That sounds like a lot of it does.

Speaker A: And in fact, my next thought here is, all right, I'm on board. Okay.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: This is something that we want to do. I'm, uh, Mr. Marketing. I've got my technical team with me and we're on board for this. This is a comprehensive process. We've really sharpened up the fuzzy end. Right. Or the fuzzy part of the front end, if I can say it that way. And this is certainly not something that anyone could learn. We could learn the framework of it in a half hour conversation, but we're not going to learn how to do it with any real success in a half hour conversation. And you mention, uh, or events such as workshops. Uh, is this something that you would come to my company or these localized. That we'd be able to sort of send a team out to or how does new product blueprinting get to me?

Speaker B: Sure. Well, 95 plus percent of the time, I guess more than that. We're doing in house workshops. So, you know, you're generally going to be. We don't exclusively work with multinationals, but about 70% of our work is with these Fortune 500. So we might start by doing some workshops in the US for your folks. Then we go over and do some in Germany or Italy and then we go to Shanghai or Korea or wherever. So generally we'll be doing workshops with 20 or 30 people, uh, in each workshop and they may have three to five teams. Now those are the in house workshops, but we also do some workshops uh, in Atlanta that we call public or open workshops. So in October and April we do a public workshop in Atlanta. We do another one in Zurich. Uh, every May, periodically, uh, we'll go over to Shanghai and do uh, some open workshops. We don't have anything on the books right now, but it's because, you know, when people bring us in, you know, there's obviously a cost, but they're also putting a lot of their own personal credibility online. What if these are a bunch of crackpots we're bringing in? Right? And so we have the public workshops. They're two days and they're virtually identical to the in house workshop. But we tell people, if you don't like this public workshop, don't bring us in because it's going to be the same. But it helps build people's confidence that what we're going to expose to their colleagues is something that they want to see.

Speaker A: The voice of the customer. I don't want to say movement, but methodology and idea. Is this really an American, North American outgoing culture sort of thing or is this a real global, uh, does this have a global application?

Speaker B: Well, great question. It's kind of a little bit of both. The term was coined about 25, 30 years ago and voice of customer in general has been rolled into things like design for Six Sigma. But it's got an interesting history. I'll make it real quick. Believe it or not, it started in Japan with quality function deployment in the late and then the Six Sigma movement kind of co opted it and made it into design for Six Sigma. But up until we started in 2005, now let me go back up until around 2000 it was generally the same. Let's go on um, with the list of questions. Then a guy by the name of Tony Ulwich from Strategy Institute, wonderful HBR paper. In 2002 he came up with Outcome Driven Innovation and he started saying let's figure out what your outcomes are. So he really kind of turned the corner on this and then we kind of picked up the mantle just for B2B and really kind of hyper fine tuned that for B2B. So the answer is today you'll have people in, um, North America, some Latin America, definitely Europe and some of the more developed regions of Asia wanting to do VOC, but doing different levels of um, sophistication. When you get into some of the more developing regions, and I still would put China and some other countries in this area, it's still more of a trading culture. Even consultative selling hasn't really picked up in much of a way. So up until very recently they haven't really been seeking voc. But that's starting to change even in those regions.

Speaker A: Speaking of consultative selling and consultative culture, say new product blueprinting is something that I'm interested in bringing to my group. What am I actually getting here? Am I looking at a bunch of binders that I bring back and checklists to follow or what guides me through this multi step process of outcome driven and new product blueprinting discovery?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. Well, we know it's hard to change behavior. Any of us who have been on a diet or set our New Year's resolutions know it's hard enough as an individual now good luck trying to get an entire organization to change their behavior, right? Mhm. So I would say as unusual or novel as blueprinting methods are, I would say that may also be true for our training method. So let's say your company, you're the hose company, and you say, gosh, you know what, we just need to do this. And you said, we got 25 people, we want to get trained in a workshop. Here's what it actually looked like. Your people would come to that workshop and they would get two days of training with massive amounts of role playing. Then every week for the next 31 weeks they're going to get an E learning module to kind of drill in some um, of the principles and practices. Then every month we're going to have a web conference and we're going to track their progress. So we got five who are working in five projects. Hey Steve, how did your team do? How many interviews did you do? How did it go? Any problems? What's your progress? What's your next step with your learning? And we record that and then we'll have another workshop, a final workshop in about three or four months where we train you in, we haven't talked about it yet, but in the quantitative interview method. And then we'll stay with you generally for six to 12 months. Now over this time period, Steve, you and the other learners will log into something called the blueprinting center. When you log into that, you'll see how your progress is Going with interviews and your E learning, you'll be able to take your next elearning module. You'll be able to go and download about 20, we call them blue tools. And these blue tools have got all kinds of resources, things you can send to the customer, set up the interview and debrief. After the interview you'll have this huge blue health knowledge center, this massive library where you can ask questions and basically taking this stuff out of my brain and my colleague's brain and digitizing it. Then you'll have your project tracker there where you can see how your team is doing on a regular basis. And then you'll also have blueprint or software I mentioned earlier, getting in here, projecting sticky notes up on a screen and uh, people are going to be customers will kind of watch you as you're filling them in. That's just one of many elements of the blueprinter software. There's market segmentation and there's analysis of interviews. So essentially the blueprinting center is something you get per life that you keep going back to. There is a subscription for the software and you don't want to keep that going. But it's basically all the stuff you need. It's all self contained in the whole learning process. Mhm. And then we work very closely to help you succeed with it.

Speaker A: Part of that success too is uh, an output my management might have my m. Feet to the fire asking for progress, which you've just uh, mentioned how one way to measure that. You reminded me too that there's another set of interviews out there, those quantitative preference interviews. And uh, you're quite right, we haven't really touched on those. Are there any kind of salient differences to highlight here? You know, why we would want to do both or why we would do them separately?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the reason you do them separately is you want to amass all those topics. Let's say we talk to seven different, you know, earth moving construction equipment companies about their needs and we got, you know, five to ten top picks from each. So now we got 50 pop tips. Okay. So what we do is we data mine them in the software. Uh, and we have these little sticky note piles, we look for duplicates, we get it down. So we've got these piles of unique outcomes. So if low temperature flexibility came up four times, we just have one pile of four sticky notes. Then we go through this process which I won't bore our listeners on now, but essentially you come up with a short list of the topics that came up the most. Let's say 10 of those. Okay. Now what you do is you go back generally to the same companies you interviewed in Discovery. Doesn't have to be, and you do a quantitative interview. Now in this quantitative interview, the main thing you're going to ask is this, okay, Mr. Caterpillar customer, on a scale of one to ten, um, how important is low temperature flexibility? And on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you today with the low temperature flexibility you're getting? Now, we tell them what a 5, 7, 10 means and they can make it 8.5 if they want. But the key thing to Remember is on 10 outcomes, they're scoring importance and satisfaction. Now let's say we do that with every one of those equipment manufacturer, construction equipment, OEMs. Now, at the end of the day we're going to have these charts that the software generates. Consider the bubble chart. The bubble chart plots importance against satisfaction. What do we really want to see? We want to find some outcomes that are important that are not being satisfied today. Because the only thing those companies are going to pay us a premium for as a host supplier is if you work on something important, it's not important, you're not going to pay premium. So it's got to be important and it's got to be something they're not getting today. If we just give them what they're already getting, we won't get a premium. In fact, they might use us to beat down the competition. So what we're going to do now in these interviews is we're going to find those outcomes that the market segment deemed as important and not satisfied. We've got a little formula. The chart we have, I won't go through the calculations, it's out on our website. But we call it the Market Satisfaction Gap Chart. And the more important and less satisfied an outcome is, like high temperature durability, whatever it might be, the more eager customers are to see us improving. And what we've learned over literally tens of thousands of interviews by our customers is that if you get a market satisfaction gap of around 30% or more, that's your indication that customers are eager. So remember we talked earlier about the front end and the development stage and the scientists and engineers guessing what to work on. Well, now they have hard evidence they will only work on outcomes that customers had a high market satisfaction gap for. Hm.

Speaker A: Now in my mind I'm picturing these two interviews happening, uh, where several discovery, uh, front end, uh, the first round of interviews are taking place and there's no set, uh, questions to ask there's no checklist to go down. There's no, would you be happy with a, uh, you know, a hose that had abrasion resistance or anything like that? It's problem. Yeah, it's problem oriented. It's a discovery, not research endeavor where uh, you're just kind of, kind of collecting and observing and asking and learning as much as you can, um, the scope and the breadth of the problems. And then the second round and that's all. So we talked to, as you mentioned, several different customers. You may hear some at one that you didn't hear at another. And then the second round is sort of the curated list of those problems that seem to surface the most or with the most energy and vehemence, even if we only heard it once, but somebody really cared about it. Right. And that's when we, yeah, we're getting into this quantitative effort to succinctly and efficiently identify where the companies can find premium. Now that right there I think is a great business case. Everything leading up to that sentence, uh, could be a bit fuzzy and a bit soft and hard to sell, especially to large company management. But you're Talking about a 15, 20 year track record of being able to do that within organizations. So it's self sustaining at this point. It's people know that it works and they're talking to you about it. And obviously here at Searchlight we feel the same way certainly, uh, around discovery interviews and uh, identifying problems. My question here though is, okay, so this is a lot of effort to get to uh, an area of that customer's satisfaction gap or market satisfaction gap. What happens? How do we make sure that we're capturing that premium? Is it simply because we're first or is that beyond the scope of what you guys would like to get into?

Speaker B: Well no, actually it's part and parcel of it. So first of all, when we think about going into product development stage, we want to get um, a design that will get us a premium. So the first thing we say, well, first of all, let's not work on anything that customers don't want. What have we done? We've essentially eliminated most commercial risk in the front end. A lot of companies when they're in the development stage, if they have a portfolio of products, uh, projects they're working on, they will often, uh, assess the commercial and the technical risk of those projects. And they go, oh, it's a commercial risk. What's the technical risk? And we're saying, well, that's okay if you're in B2C, but if you're in B2B. Why would you want to have any significant commercial risk in development if you can ask your really smart customers ahead of time to help you get rid of that, which is what we do. In fact, if you don't mind, let me just hit that point for a minute. The two major reasons you have commercial risk are errors of omission and errors of commission. So let me just talk about how these interviews eliminate those. When you do a discovery interview, it's qualitative, it's divergent. What else, Mr. Customer? It's designed to uncover an unarticulated need. Now an error of omission is failing to uncover that unarticulated need. And by doing this methodology with the screen, letting the customers lead, having multiple people there interviewing multiple companies, interviewing down the value chain, every time we take one of those steps, we lower the risk, but there's an unarticulated need that we miss. And by the way, no team has ever faulted for, um, an error moment because nobody knows they omitted it. The other reason for high commercial risk is error omission. This is picking the wrong thing to work on. We eliminate that by having hard quantitative market satisfaction gaps. So we're getting information unfiltered, unbiased, from the customer. So that way we don't, we don't really have any risk of, um. Well, we think this is what they want and we hope this is what they want. So your question on premium, the first thing is we're only going to work on stuff that we know they want. But then to get that premium, what you have to do is do some probing, find out how much faster do they want it, how much colder, what would be the value of that? And we do teach people how to build a value calculator and actually project the optimum pricing. That's more work, but it's oftentimes worth it.

Speaker A: Mhm. In the same realm. And thank you for the overview. Earlier in the interview we were talking about how, uh, people are solving a current problem that they might have today. In this case, we're talking about, well, how would a company solve their risk problem today? And they're not doing these interviews, or if they are, they're ahead of the curve. Uh, my thought here is that in terms of risk reduction, if we don't have a discovery process in place and we've got some new product development going on anyway, everyone's spending money on R and D, that risk reduction likely takes the form of more incremental change instead of a kind of Radical, uh, or even substantive. We want to take it down a notch, change to the product line. Is that something that new product blueprinting helps overcome or are we talking about all new products in general for a client to consider?

Speaker B: Yeah. So new product blueprinting, uh, is used for all types of innovation. A lot of companies have pulled in their horns and they've gotten more incremental because they've not done well as they do more step change, transformational. So new product blueprinting is used for all types of, um, innovation. But now I have to say what we've learned over the last four years is when you go into unfamiliar markets, blueprinting, you can think of it as necessary but not sufficient. Um, it does a great job of finding out what the customers are not getting that they would like to get. It does not always do a great job of finding out what customers are already getting and want to keep getting. So in other words, the incumbents, if we try to go into a market we're not in, the incumbent suppliers have built up a lot of competencies and capabilities that nobody even talks about anymore. And there's a danger we will miss those. So about four years ago we started developing a whole new offering to kind of supplement blueprinting. We call it Minesweeper de Risking. And um, basically the approach is you have a two day workshop and you get all the assumptions out on the table and then what you do is you develop a checkpoint plan to drive them from uncertainty to certainty. There's a certain methodology we use, and the reason we call it mine sweeper software is we're looking for potential landmines, something that could blow up a project. If you talk to somebody on a failed project, several people on the team, they'll usually agree what it was that blew up their project. And if you ask them, would that could that uh, mind have been nullable earlier? They almost always will say yes. So instead of doing a post mortem, let's do a pre mortem, let's figure out what good look project. So I would say, you know, blueprinting is what most companies need because it's kind of like low hanging fruit. There's, there's so much better they could do. But if they do have some large high risk projects, they might want to consider this Minesweeper de Risking to take a lot of pressure off them.

Speaker A: Certainly. And you mentioned a couple terms in there. I just want to make sure. Uh, and I want to clarify that you answered a question I was about to ask, which is when I hear Voice of customer or voice of the customer, it invokes in my mind, I'm going to go talk to the people that I'm already selling to. I already have a client base I've already got a relationship with. But you just mentioned a move into an unfamiliar market. I noticed you didn't say new market, you said unfamiliar. Uh, and I feel like there's probably a difference there. And is it true that I'm hearing this is something that I can employ even if I say I'm a business new business development manager director, and I've been tasked with going to find unfamiliar markets that my company doesn't sell into yet?

Speaker B: That's exactly right. I'm glad you picked up that. For 29 years while I was industry, I used to say, hey guys, let's go into a new market. Well, guess what? In almost all cases, the market was already there. I was just a new supplier to the market. So that was kind of supplier centric thinking and speaking. So now we like to say, let's go into an unfamiliar market. Now, why is that significant? Well, in B2B, sometimes you'll have an embryonic market that truly is new, but they're very rare. In most cases, it means I want to go into a market that I haven't been, but because the market was there already, there's a huge amount of knowledge and insight and foresight and objectivity that I can tap into. So once I'm in the interview, it doesn't look that different from one where I've been calling on this market for 30 years. But it is a little harder to set up the interviews. In fact, that's why has been helpful for some of our clients to help get those interviews set up. For instance, um, so there are a few differences to it, but we find our clients will use the blueprinting method for poor markets, for adjacencies, and even totally transformational, totally unfamiliar markets. Uh, but they may need to think a little bit about the de risking if they're going into real transformational stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sensing that you and I are kind of building up ahead of steam to run into the next three hours of conversation here. But, um, let's cap it off, I think at, uh, we had a great overview with a lot of detail left to uncover around, uh, the AIM Institute, uh, its offerings. Whether that's new product blueprinting or this new minesweeper, which I'm interested to learn more about. Maybe on another call, but between now and then, if I'm listening to this and I want to learn more. How can I best engage with and find the AIM Institute?

Speaker B: Yeah, the best bet is to go out to our website, theaiminstitute.com don't go to AIM Institute. I think you'll get the American Injection Molding Institute. Put the word B in front of it. One thing I might suggest is when, if a listener goes out, you'll see services. We talk about blueprinting, we talked about mind sweep for de risking. And the third thing we have is something on product launch. But there's also an area called growth pools and they might be interested in this. Steve, we have three growth pools. One is a B2B index. You can see how B2B your market is. These are all free tools and it's kind of interesting how B2B kind of frames how you approach a market. We've got one called Future Scenes where we have a whole bunch of future trends that are really kind of cool sheets you can use to spark thinking in your strategy sessions. And the third one is a growth diagnostic, another free tool. We've got over 5,000 data points. And let's say your company, Steve, said, I want to know how we're doing on 24 growth drivers. Well, we would send you a link, you could send it to your people and we'd give you this 20 page booklet showing you how you're doing against 50 percentile, 20, top quartile, top decile on these growth drivers to help your company. So those are all free, uh, tools@theaiminstitute.com.

Speaker A: all right, so theaiminstitute.com will have a link in the description. Uh, so if you've listened this far, you don't have to feel like fast forwarding all the way again, uh, to the end to get to the URL. But with that, uh, Dan, thank you very much for joining us today.

Speaker B: It's been a real pleasure, Steve. Thanks for having me over.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Thanks again for joining us today. And please don't forget to tap subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. In the meantime, head over to thesearchlight.com for more customer discovery content. Till we meet again, I'm, um, your host, Steve Lachance, and this has been a faster horse podcast, an innovator's guide to customer discovery.