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 Monday, February 07, 2011 |
| Listening to your Customer Part 2 |
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One of my favorite past posts is give your customer what he wants. You don't have to be a sales person to be in contact with your customer either. Most people I come into contact with every day are my customer in some sense or other. I would like to expound on this topic a little more with an example that comes to mind.
 We were asked to design an educational 8086 trainer by a local distributor of educational products. The owner of the company, Hyram, came to us with a very intense look on his face. He was kind of a scarey guy because he would tell us stories of being a paratrooper in the Isralei military and throwing grenades and shooting machine guns. Hyram was buying his electronic based products and re-selling it to the schools. He was getting creamed by his competition because they manufactured their own product and could thus offer a lower price. He needed to go head to head with them. Hyram was NOT the kind of guy that liked to get creamed in anything he did. He was the guy who did the "creaming."
Now this fellow knew his competition. He knew what he wanted He was a savvy marketeer. He was an very intense man. We spec'd out a product for him feature by feature. We compared it to the competetion and gave him the expected product cost to compare. One of the features he needed was an EPROM programmer. Now realize this was the mid 90's and EPROM's were on the decline. At this point most designs used EEPROM (Flash was to come later). We wanted to go with the newer and more efficient EEPROM technology.
 There was a problem. EEPROMS did not require a seperate programming step as did the EPROMS. They simply acted as slow memory when you wrote to them. They did not need a programmer because they could be programed from any memory socket. Technically this was better, but not for him in reality because the lack of a distinct programming might lead a customer to conclude that the competition, using older technology that required the special programming circuitry and voltages, had an additional feature. His competition had an EPROM programmer. He needed to match this feature. We had to clearly delineate this feature to him and to his customers. Being able to program from any socket could actually be a detrimental feature.
The solution we came up with made our customer very happy. We took one of the regular memory sockets and put the words "EEPROM PROGRAMMER" above it with a couple of LED's to simulate programming and verifying. He was able to sell his microcomputer trainer with this highly visual feature on his marketing material and match features with his competition! The best part was that the cost of this feature was just two LED's and a ZIF socket!
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damon at 10:11 PM |
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