By Pam Walatka
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It’s hard to imagine a high-tech businessperson who couldn’t profit from reading “Getting It Right the First Time” (Praeger, 2005), by local residents John Katsaros and Peter Christy.
Most marketing books don’t deal with the problems faced by innovative technology businesses. Katsaros and Christy, Silicon Valley veterans and principals of the Los Altos-based NetsEdge Research Group, know from experience how Valley businesses can anticipate future markets.
The book, subtitled “How Innovative Companies Anticipate Demand,” stresses the need to combine market and technology research with strategic business planning.
Katsaros and Christy argue that in high-tech you can’t afford a year of trial and error finding your market niche: “Now, more than ever … your business strategy has to be right at the onset.”
The authors introduce a technique they call “expert interviews,” a blend of sales and marketing research. Expert interviews provide the clues that can help you see what is likely to happen with your product. You talk with people (selected from your potential customers) who know much more than you do about a particular subject.
Through expert interviews, you find common threads and weave them into a product idea. You use this research to improve and refine a business strategy.
The authors write, “Great positioning happens when you capture a word in the minds of your customers. … Expert interviews offer a great opportunity to find out which words have meaning to your customers.”
There are three key points about expert interviews:
1. No randomness - you search for the right people.
2. You use an expert like yourself - rather than research assistants - to talk to the experts.
3. You decide what is and is not relevant.
Expert interviews are the way to find out what is going to be changing tomorrow.
A tip for choosing the experts to interview: Follow the money. Validate that the potential customer has the means and authority to buy your product. Does the person have a real problem they would spend money to solve?
The book makes the case for doing research up front in the planning process.
Many engineers think they can figure things out on their own, without market research, and then discover too late that it is “expensive to learn when you are already staffed up.”
“Anticipating the future is the single most important thing that a management team needs to succeed,” the authors write. They quote Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.”
Katsaros and Christy present a detailed plan for identifying your top customers before you enter the market, successfully position your company and its products before those customers, and catch emerging trends before your competitors do.
The authors note that the book was in revision and refinement for four years after the manuscript was submitted to the editor. It shows. They used a working group of 20 story reviewers. The book is well written and well edited.
Katsaros and Christy are scheduled to speak and sign copies of their book 7-8:30 p.m., Thursday, at Main Street Cafe & Books, 134 Main St., Los Altos.
