Is your client a dull and boring guy? Does he yawn when he hears your proposals? Does he even brag about your products or services? Perhaps it is time to apply a revolutionary method of innovation, it is not about process, product or business model innovation (for those enlightened on the subject), it is about applying innovation to the life of your client .
For my part, as a good techie that I am, I find it extremely difficult to avoid thinking about concrete products, about technological solutions packed with features, functions and buttons. At the end of the day, there have been many years at the University thinking in those terms. If something can’t be painted on a flowchart, on a user interface sketch, if it doesn’t have buttons or processes, it doesn’t exist. Engineers think a lot about products and very little about people (in our professional lives, it goes without saying).
To avoid ending up building perfect products that nobody wants -a common mistake made by engineers- we must make a little effort and think of people, yes, those entities that think and speak for themselves… Specifically, we should learn to think from the inside out. point of view of our potential client. One dynamic that personally helps me enormously is imagining a day in the life of my client and trying to think of how I could make it better in some way.
To carry out this exercise we have to imagine a specific person, abstract concepts such as public administration, restaurants or hospitals are not valid. If our clients are restaurants, let’s imagine the manager of the inn below the house. What will your day to day be like? Me, under my house I have a bar-hamburger of those of a lifetime, the ones that make really big hamburgers, not like McDonalds. I can imagine Max (that’s the name of the owner) opening every day at 7:00 in the morning, preparing the sandwiches he has on the bar and delivering the first coffees (which he also serves). Being a neighborhood bar, Max has more or less the same customers on a daily basis. It has a fixed clientele with very few variations. What will be the thing that bothers Max the most about his day to day? What problems are you facing? How to help you?
Maybe what Max wants is to stop constantly coming out from the bar to wait tables. Surely if you had more clients you could hire a second person to do it. If I approach him and try to sell him a new website, he will surely look at me in disbelief and yawn… Why do you want a website? However, if I tell him that I’m going to bring in twenty new clients every day, he may well listen. And it is that with this change, his life would be transformed because he could hire someone to serve the tables. voila. We have innovated the life of our client.
Innovation applied to the customer’s life is an (invented) tool that greatly facilitates moving from the abstraction of a value proposition to the resolution of a specific need. As a team tool it is sometimes even convenient to “draw a day in the life of your client”. Do a simple storyboard with your team and think about what your customer’s life is like and what it will be like with your product. You must be very clear about what improvement because if it is not like that, he will not believe you either.