by Paul Herbig

Created on: May 15, 2009   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

Learn from your customers: Lead Users


Your customers may know better than you do what they need. Ask your sales reps to observe the innovative, unusual, often unexpected ways your customers may be using your products. Look to your customers for new ideas, especially those you deem as lead customers and pay attention, really, really, pay attention to what they are doing. Your customers' unanticipated applications might lead to new ways to market existing products or to tap latent demand for new products.. You just might learn something that you can market to all the rest of your customers. This is especially true of your lead users.

A lead user is a person or company who takes a product and adapts it to their personal needs to complete a specific task. A lead user will develop a need and alter a product often to complete the task in a higher quality or in a more efficient manner. Many lead users are ahead of the marketplace in general, whether it be months or years in the future. % In the lead user, we find the information to answer the customer need question much earlier and the companies with this information will be the first to develop, build, and sell this product in a refined form. By some accounts, nearly 80% of all new ideas come from such customers. .Lead users are primarily found in abundance in the highly technical fields such as medical or computer fields but they can be found in all industries. Lead users are much more common in these rapidly changing fields: Scientific instruments are 77% user designed, semi conductors 67%, tractor shovels 6% and plastics 0

Because lead users must benefit from the innovations they create, they must have a reason to share innovations with other companies. If they do not have compensation, they will simply keep it to themselves. It is the duty of the marketer to offer ways of compensation for the use of the lead users innovations. The first and most obvious method to obtain the information from lead users is to straight out pay them for it. Search out lead users and pay them periodically to see if they have new ideas or improvements on a product. The company can offer money to anyone with user ideas on a certain product. A problem with this is the access that other companies will have to the same people. A way around this would be to get an exclusive contract with the innovator. The innovator will be loyal and helpful to the company. Information from lead users may be obtained through donation of equipment and allow

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