BA 290A-2 and ME290P
Fall 1998

Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methodology

• Presentation on User and Customer NEEDS

Market Opportunity

The success of a new enterprise software and hardware vendor is dependent on their the ability to win early customers, make them successful and leverage these wins into more sales. As described in the famous high-tech marketing book, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore creating successful, "referenceable" customers is the key to growth and eventual market acceptance. Recently, we have seen increased use of "customer success" advertising from large enterprise vendors. Examples include Netscape's recent Ford Motor Company ads and the very successful IBM e-business ad campaign.

Creating, maintaining and leveraging existing customers to create new sales is a great challenge and few companies do it well. Reference customers are used heavily in several ways:

• As ad-hoc references, who make themselves available to potential customers

• In press releases to highlight actual uses of a product. Often includes customer quotes

• In industry analyst reports as cases of successful implementations

• In advertising, as poster child cases of where your product has had high impact

The process of getting customer references is very complex, political and time consuming. Often, the process is recreated for each reference instance. Accountability for maintaining data on customer referencibility is not assigned to any part of the organization, and the only fraction of the information on customer happiness exists in each of the heads of the salesperson, product manager, customer service person and profession services person involved with a given customer.

Several companies address pieces of this problem, but no one that I know of is addressing the maintenance of customer reference status and materials directly. Sales and marketing vendors like Siebel maintain customer data, but do not take the next step to leverage existing customers to create new ones. In the company I interned with this summer, they were beginning to build a system to address this need, but everyone involved was skeptical of the design proposed.

The target market would be for small to medium-sized companies in the enterprise software and hardware category.

Project Scope

This project would be to design a process and software architecture for creating and maintaining customer reference data, defining the scope of a complete product. The prototype would include a single module of the software product.