All companies, whatever their sector of activity, want to understand their markets and be customer-oriented. For both of these objectives, there are broad common principles and objectives, but the practicalities of achieving them may be quite different. The market may be consumer, it may be B2B with customers who are private organisations, B2G with customers who are public organisations, B2B/B2G with customers who buy low-tech products and offerings, or B2B/B2G high-tech.
So what does it mean to understand your markets and be customer oriented in technology and how does it require you to face particular challenges?
Understanding your markets: specificity of high-tech B2B/B2G
Understanding your markets means understanding their structure, the different “market segments” that make them up, identifying the influential players and understanding their role. It also means identifying current or potential competitors and understanding the economic and technological dynamics. Finally, it means measuring the overall potential and the potential accessible to the company, taking into account its assets and those of its products, using different “granulometries”.
The specificity of high-tech B2B/B2G is due to the complexity of ecosystems and value chains, the difficulty of segmenting markets in a relevant way, of anticipating the impact of innovations at the right time, of identifying where new competitors could emerge, and the lack or absence of public information, whether quantified or not, on markets that are often confidential in every sense of the term
Customer orientation in the B2B/B2G high-tech world
In any company, being customer-oriented means knowing how to listen to and understand them, how to satisfy them profitably, and how to develop their loyalty. In the B2B/B2G world in general, it means understanding each client and each group of clients in all the possible variety of business types or “missions”, influences and decision-making processes, operating modes, internal processes, company cultures and individual attitudes.
More specifically in the world of high-tech B2B/B2G, this means adding to this the understanding and anticipation of customer behaviour in the face of technological innovation, as well as the ability to maintain a constructive dialogue around existing or future technologies. In this dialogue, it is often necessary to manage delicate issues of technological secrecy, intellectual property or co-ownership.
Internally, it means knowing how to bring together strong technical expertise with the ability to listen to customers in order to create and adapt its products and services. It means developing the services, whether they are basic or highly advanced, that customers need to operate at their best in their own business and knowing how to deliver these services efficiently and reliably while constantly improving them. It means knowing how to listen, but not just listen, in order to be able to innovate even beyond what customers can express and sometimes imagine.
In the technology company, it is above all a challenge of attitude to avoid technical arrogance and a challenge of organisation to make a large number of actors in contact with customers cooperate.
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