3 Customer-Focused Strategies for Product Managers to Increase Revenue {{ currentPage ? currentPage.title : "" }}

It is often emphasized that an organization's long-term success is deeply rooted in the quality of customer experience they deliver.

 

Customer-focused organizations are committed to interacting and developing trusted connections with their customers — which allows them to understand their needs better and deliver solutions that best help customers achieve their goals. In short, they adopt a needs-first approach rather than an ideas-first/products-first approach to develop products their end users truly benefit from.

 

This in turn helps organizations gain a competitive edge in the market and sustainably increase revenue.

 

When we talk about establishing a customer-focused culture, we mean going beyond traditional customer service norms; it includes identifying the myriad of jobs customers are trying to get done, exploring the deep motivations behind their purchase behavior, and effectively solving their unmet needs.

 

In this article, we'll highlight X customer-driven tactics that product managers should leverage to increase sales revenue.

Identify jobs customers want to get done

Discovering the right problems to solve should be the first step towards creating a winning product that delivers results. However, it is also the most complicated aspect of product development. If you don't have a clear framework or methodology, you won't know where to begin.

 

You want to closely study your customers, their purchase behavior, motivations, etc and try to determine what jobs they are trying to accomplish. This should take into account the product and technologies currently available in the market and how well your customers are able to piece together those solutions to solve their problems.

 

Here, the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework can be a highly effective approach to identify what customers are looking to achieve and how you can help them in the process.

 

The JTBD methodology will help you identify the various jobs customers are trying to get done, so you can channel your design and engineering efforts towards developing a product that doesn't just deliver but also increases sales revenue.

Include new add-on products

An effective strategy is to consider developing a new add-on product that complements your core product. However, a new product can lay the foundation for long-term success.

 

Before you include add-ons, ensure you have a deep understanding of your customer's needs.

 

The idea is to take away the focus from the solution or product  itself, and shift it to the customer.

 

Through the use of trusted, customer-focused frameworks like the Jobs-To-Be-Done technique, you can reduce the time and cost to deliver a winning product that helps increase revenue.

 

Leveraging JTBD approach to discover product ideas typically includes interacting with your customers at a deep-rooted level to understanding what their unmet needs are.

 

Are you aware of the problems your customers are trying to solve? Are your product teams aware of your customers’ needs? Do engineers and designers on your teams have insight into your customers’ behaviors and motivations?

 

You might conduct insightful surveys to create a list of customer JTBDs — which can then be categorized as "Main JTBDs" and "Tasks related to those JTBDs".

 

This will help you prioritize the features and additional functionalities that your customers value the most.

Unlock new revenue streams

Your current revenue streams are unlikely to generate incremental revenue for the long-term; you need to uncover hidden opportunities and unlock new revenue streams to sustainably generate large-scale revenue. This typically includes expanding to international markets with the help of competitive steal-away programs.

 

Remember though, expanding to new geographical markets is a long-term proposition. While it is comparatively more simple to initiate an expansion today (with cloud-based, SaaS applications having an edge over physical software), there is still plenty that needs to be done for you to succeed.

 

A good starting point is studying your target audience to gain deep insight into their pain points, unmet needs, and purchase behaviors.

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