2. Blueprinting and customer outcomes

Blueprinting is the "science of B2B customer insight" with 9 levels for magnifying customer outcomes.

New Product Blueprinting focuses the team intensely on customer outcomes for the initial steps… including customer interviews. Customer outcomes are nothing more than customers’ desired end-results. If you produced conveyor belting, these outcomes might be… increased abrasion resistance… reduced maintenance costs… and so on.

Think of customer outcomes as “what” the customer wants… while your solutions are “how” they will be satisfied. You need to understand these in depth because the only way to create customer value is to improve outcome(s) that are both important and currently unsatisfied. And your business’s only path to profitable, sustainable growth is creating customer value. The better you understand these outcomes, the better your growth can be.

You can think of New Product Blueprinting as the “science of B2B customer insight.” No other methodology allows you to understand these outcomes in such depth. It’s something like a microbiologist putting a specimen under her microscope and turning up the magnification.

But in this case, your “specimens” are customer outcomes. You’ll increase your “magnification” as you go through the 9 levels shown in the illustration. The first 3 levels are handled in Discovery interviews… the next 3 in Preference interviews… and the remaining with other methods, e.g. side-by-side testing and the use of a value calculator.

For more on these 9 levels of magnification, download the AIM white paper, Catching the Innovation Wave, pp 9-13. Also check out the 2-minute video, Immerse your team in customer outcomes, part of the B2B Organic Growth video series by Dan Adams.

Keywords: customer outcome, customer value, Discovery interview, Preference interview, science of B2B customer insight, New Product BlueprintingB2B Organic Growth Video 22