Synopsis: Building Materials Manufacturer — Behavior Driven Growth Strategy
QDI helped a building materials manufacturer identify and overcome the barriers that were stalling his growth. The client was involved in a “specified” product market. These markets require that for a product to be purchased, an engineer had to specify that product or product capability on an engineering design, which then leads to a bid request. The client felt it was winning a very acceptable portion of the bids it saw, but felt it was not on as many bids as it felt it should be.
The client asked QDI to conduct in-depth research to learn how to increase the specification of its products. QDI conducted in-depth market analysis and learned the small number of architects the client could reach and influence was their bottleneck to growth.
QDI conducted in-depth interviews with architects to learn how they went about deciding what products to specify. The research was based on the use of QDI’s customer journey profiling approach which started with a discussion with the architect as to what would trigger his need for our type of product, or applications / problems that our client’s product could meet. This conversation then went on to discuss how the architect became educated about a product he was going to spec, how he made the decision to “select” / (i.e., purchase in our model) and the specific applications he was using it in and when he had decided not to use it (replacement for whatever reason).
Using this model, QDI consultants often go across the organization to identify other influencers and how they behave in the selection process, but in this case we focused strictly on the architect because he was the decision-maker.
The breakthrough came when we discovered the key to influencing the design was providing the architect with case studies that matched their application AND environmental conditions. Once we learned this, it made perfect sense – the architects are extremely busy and will revert to what has worked in the past unless they have easy access as to what will work for them in their specific situation. Thus, providing them with case studies that matched their specific applications / their need was a significant value to the architect, as it allowed him to provide his customers the best available solution while still fitting within architect’s available time to make selections.
Within the client’s huge CRM initiative that they were undertaking were the communication tools to customize messages to architects focusing on their current project needs. From QDI’s research our client learned they could use CRM, and the content and information organization they needed in their CRM systems, to address the specific issue that was blocking growth.