07 Nov

Line of Sight Group: Proud Sponsor of ProductCamp Twin Cities 2018

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The team at Line of Sight loves it when we have a chance to attend and sponsor great events…and ProductCamp Twin Cities 2018 really fit the bill! The event was held for the second year at The Nerdery, where attendees were able to share insights and network with developers, engineers, project managers, marketers, user experience, customer experience, product managers, and others who are passionate about product.

This user-organized “unconference” featured Sarita Parikh, Senior Director Consumer Experience and Strategy, Pearson, who gave the keynote speech, “Influencing Behavior in an Irrational World.” Attendees also had their choice of several other sessions, including  Product Management Excellence: Creating a Best-in-Class Product Management Organization (Jeff Lash), Linguistics for Voice Interaction Designers: A Crash Course (Ellen Lucast) and more. Engaging speakers and plenty of networking opportunities made for a successful day! We look forward to seeing you next year at ProductCamp 2019.

24 Oct

Line of Sight Group: Proud Sponsors of PDMA ProductCamp Twin Cities 2018

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The count-down begins for ProductCamp Twin Cities 2018 at The Nerdery in Bloomington, Minnesota! This is another great opportunity for Line of Sight Group to keep a pulse on the needs of product managers, by attending and sponsoring local events.

ProductCamp is a user-driven “unconference” that brings together people who are passionate about products and interested in collaborating to share insights. It is also a great opportunity to meet others in the Twin Cities product community.

The event brings together developers, engineers, project managers, marketers, user experience, customer experience, product managers, and more.

Sessions are throughout the day. Sarita Parikh, Senior Director Consumer Experience and Strategy, Pearson, will deliver the keynote session – Influencing Behavior in an Irrational World.

It all starts on November 3rd. Please click here to find out more and register. Come on out to see us! It’s FREE!

28 Dec

Competing on Customer Experience in Retail

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Customer Experience is the area many retailers have chosen to compete on over the past few years. When it comes to shopping, it is breaking increasingly into “chore” vs. “cherish” activities. On the “chore” side, firms like Amazon offer commodity pricing, streamlined delivery, and voice recognition to make online ordering an easy experience for obtaining essentials. That leaves “cherish,” the type of shopping based on the discovery of interesting products and socializing them with others. This type of shopping is characterized by a great physical presence, unique items, and creating meaningful experiences. You’ll find artisan crafted products, hand-picked selections, custom built offers, or even built-by-the customer creations. How might a retailer best compete in the Customer Experience realm?

One of the first areas to consider is to understand the external environment.  What are the trends and who are the competitors? Are there competitors offering something similar? How are they unique? What kinds of experiences do they offer? Are they competing on digital or physical experience or both or is it something else?

Next, savvy retailers track and map internal environment elements like customer journeys and voice of the customer as well as metrics like Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction. Asking for feedback after every interaction or transaction is wearing customers down so building insight via analytics into the flow (that is not invasive) will be a key.

With external and internal environment insight in hand, retailers have a number of levers available to pull.  Retailers can swiftly test and prototype various experience design elements using service blueprinting, bio-mimicry and design thinking.  Some are using Virtual Reality to conduct their prototyping digitally as a first step. Capturing insight via primary and secondary research about the external and internal environment goes a long way towards creating a strategy to compete on customer experience as a differentiator in retail. Knowing the type of shopping that your current and future customers engage in can align your strategy and go-to-market initiatives on a path toward delivering meaningful and differentiated customer experiences in the digital and physical worlds.

06 Oct

Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Tips and Techniques

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Last week, Line of Sight Group partnered with the Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) Association to deliver a panel discussion to explore how various organizational roles define and use intelligence to formulate strategy and execute go-to-market initiatives. The panel consisted of practitioners from several industries and across several roles. There were panelists and attendees not only from SCIP but from other associations representing the roles we sought including Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA) and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).

The fast-paced discussion first explored what types of intelligence were needed. With so much data available from so many sources, there is a heightened importance for analyzing, synthesizing and making sense of it. Several ideas emerged from making it simple, visual, or put into the context of the consumer of the intelligence. One of the firms had operationalized this into Red, Yellow, and Green dashboards. Some added that storytellers could be employed to convey the messages and clues found in the intelligence. There was attention given to the ways that technology was impacting the field – several firms are using or are built on analytics. Others are starting to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR).

There were some interesting examples, as well. One firm conducted Scenario Planning and accurately predicted the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon. Another example was that Red Roof Inns capitalized on the fact that 2% of all airline flights are cancelled and figured out a way to cater to temporarily stranded travelers yielding a very favorable business outcome.

Another aspect that emerged was the importance of building trust and collaborating amongst the various roles in research, product management, marketing, sales, customer experience and strategy formulation. With the advent of technology like cloud, mobile, big data and the aforementioned analytics, AI and VR, the notion of sustainable competitive advantage is challenged. This points towards an ongoing monitoring of the external environment to either avoid disruption or to get ahead of the curve and do some disruption.

The panel ended by sharing a list of helpful books:

  • The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company by John Rossman
  • Do I Make Myself Clear? by Harold Evans
  • Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
  • Originals: How Non-conformists Change the World by Adam Grant
  • Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function by SCIP
  • The Strategist by Cynthia A. Montgomery
  • Good Leaders Ask Great Questions by John C. Maxwell
  • Assorted Competitive Intelligence Books by Michael Porter and Liam Fahey
13 Sep

SCIP Minnesota Presents: A Panel Discussion with Line of Sight Group, PDMA & CXPA Practitioners

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Line of Sight Group is proud to be part of SCIP Minnesota’s panel discussion later this month. President and Founder Steve Schulz will join other top experts in the competitive intelligence, product management, and customer experience arenas.

The discussion will touch on and provide insight on common challenges, including the type of intelligence leadership is looking for, and illustrate how top practitioners gather intelligence for internal use and on their competitors. Panelists will also illustrate some useful tips and tools that are used by top practitioners.

Other panelists include:

  • Lori Laflin, Global Customer Engagement Research Program Manager, Cargill/ Member CXPA , CCXP
  • Paul Santilli, WW OEM Business Intelligence & Customer Insights at Hewlett Packard Enterprise/ Secretary & Treasurer, Board of Directors, SCIP
  • Mark Jensen, Director of Product Management-Distribution, Epicor Software/ Board of Directors, PDMA
  • Tom Mcgoldrick, Strategic Insights Director of UnitedHealth Group

The Panel will be moderated by Brett Norgaard, Principal, Line of Sight Group.

The SCIP MN Panel Discussion will take place September 27 from 5 pm-7 pm Central Time at the Grant Park Conference Room, 500 East Grant Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For more information or to attend the event, please go to the SCIP MN website or reach out to MN Chapter Chair, Julie Johnson.

Line of Sight’s Market-i Competitive Intelligence Program is a SCIP “Endorsed” product. Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) is the nonprofit Association representing the Integrated Intelligence industry internationally for over 32 years.

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29 Jun

Pulling the Sales Intelligence Advantage Levers

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One of the major trends in B2B selling over the past few years has been for sales teams to employ a strategy similar to management consultants – challenge, provoke and question clients and prospects about the status quo while building a case for a more compelling future. This approach has proven to be effective and requires a steady pipeline of relevant, specific and timely intelligence to back it up. Depending on the situation, there are a number of levers you can pull to arm the sales force with an intelligence advantage as they engage with executive level prospects.

The first lever is to conduct a Competitive Landscape Analysis – an exercise employing several management frameworks to review all forms of direct and indirect competition, relevant trends, opportunities and threats. This provides the sales team with a thorough understanding of their firm’s value proposition vs. the competition and relative to the market trends.

The next is to allow the Competitive Landscape Analysis to inform an ongoing Strategic Monitoring of announcements, updates and changes in the market. This ensures that the sales team is kept abreast of timely information and will not be caught off-guard when engaging with executive prospects.

Competitor Profiles can provide the sales team with a deep knowledge of the value proposition, positioning, differentiators, offers, customers, partners, personnel, and capabilities. Sales teams can use this insight to contrast themselves vs. their competitors when engaging with executive prospects. Battle Cards are a one page version of the Competitor Profile that focus on how to mitigate competitor strengths and exploit weaknesses.

Win/Loss Analysis gets to the heart of why deals are won and lost. Done correctly, they provide a wealth of objective feedback that the sales team can use to build upon strengths and learn from losses. The loss reviews provide some of the most useful feedback for improving the future win rate.

For sales teams heavily involved with services, Customer Experience Benchmarking can provide meaningful insight about the kind of service that their competitors are actually providing. This provides the sales team with the exact intelligence they need to outmaneuver competitors with customer experience issues.

Validating (or debunking) Competitor Claims in the market by interviewing a wide spectrum of people familiar with a competitor is an effective way to gauge the merit of market claims. Experience shows that many claims are false, putting the competitor on their heels and opening the door for a new approach to solving a problem.

The pulling of one or more intelligence levers will give the sales team a leg up by supporting their ability to approach executive prospects with knowledgeable, specific, consistent insight about their offer relative to the competition. This might turn out to be that slight edge when up against a competitor who might be ripe for the plucking.

25 Apr

To Increase CX (and Revenue), This Lender Gave Customers a Blank Check

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Line of Sight Group constantly engages in activities to keep abreast of trends in innovation, customer experience, sales methods, service adoption and business model transformation. One trend we have noticed are the parallels in the disciplines of product management, service design and customer experience.  Over the past few weeks, we have attended events and sessions in all of these disciplines and would like to share an observation demonstrating this convergence.

Representatives from the Baker Tilly firm shared an interesting Customer Experience (CX) case at the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) local chapter meeting the other day. It was the case of a lender pre-approving customers for vehicle purchases but then realizing that less than a quarter of the pre-approved customers actually returned to the lender to complete the loan. This was very disappointing to the lender as the process to pre-approve customers took time and effort. After performing a journey mapping exercise along with some current and future state analysis, the lender added one crucial step at the beginning of the process that changed everything.

What was the innovation?  The lender started sending along a blank check valid for up to the pre-approved loan amount with the customer as they entered the dealership to purchase their new vehicle. This gave the lender’s customers a powerful tool that provided them more control over the buying experience, let them bypass the time in the financial manager’s office where they were subject to every conceivable cross-sell and up-sell tactic, and allowed them to drive away in their new vehicle without returning to the lender in advance.

Thus, a CX initiative impacted the nature of the service/product (a blank check was added), the process (avoidance of a trip back to the lender), a much better customer experience (less effort and avoiding the trip to the financial manager’s office), and a boost in business for the lender (fourfold revenue increase). In this case, the CX started with the sales process, impacted the product and service offer, as well as what the customer experienced on their vehicle buying journey.  Understanding the external environment made up of the dealers and competitive lenders along with the customer journey enabled this lender to prevail in several key areas.