Embrace the "Whole Product"
- 21 Feb 2012
I have talked a lot about enhancing the customer experience. Obviously, one of the most lasting elements of your customer's experience with your company is the day-to-day use of your product. I talked about this relationship between your products and your customers in a previous blog posting: The relevance of a 1966 spaghetti western.
There is a way to tilt the balance of the scales in your favor; to create the interdependence with your customers that builds customer intimacy — embrace the business philosophy of the "whole product."
This concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in his 1991 business management bible Crossing the Chasm. Even though this book is now over 20 years old, very few companies have been completely successful at implementing the concept of the whole product.
The reason? It's hard work. To provide a whole product solution for your customer requires gathering their specific requirements and satisfying all of those needs with a one-of-a-kind solution.
Classically, high tech has delivered 80 to 90 percent of a whole product to any number of possible target customers, but 100 percent to few, if any. Anything less than 100%, unfortunately, means that the customers must either supply the remainder themselves or feel cheated. Significantly less than 100 percent means that the target market simply does not develop as forecast—even if the generic product, the product in the box being shipped,is superior to everything else in its class.
— Geoffrey Moore
Crossing the Chasm
This is not for the faint of heart. But, it can be done, and the rewards can be significant. Over fifteen years ago I was co-leader of a project in Hewlett Packard to accomplish exactly this: to reinvent ourselves to be able to provide custom solutions through professional services to meet specific customer requirements. These services include all those required to be successful in the solutions business:
- requirements analysis,
- solution design,
- custom engineering,
- special product manufacturing,
- field project management,
- installation,
- training, and
- support services.
After only three years we had grown the professional services business over 600%! This is just the revenue growth for services — the standard product sales that were leveraged by this activity also grew significantly!
And, perhaps even more important, we created an almost unassailable barrier to entry for our competitors. After you have gone through all this work, you are intimate with your customer's business challenges and opportunities, and they yours. With this trust and interdependence in place, you become the preferred partner for future business.
This is the power of embracing the whole product as a strategy to build customer advocacy (and make some money in the process).
