In my last post, I spoke about using trade shows as a centerpiece event for securing new business and deepening relations with current clients. In this post, I will talk about how you can use a trade show event as an opportunity to get client feedback on new product or business initiatives. This piece focuses on three elements:
· How to distill a vision or concept into a clear visual that can be validated by customers
· Engaging company executives as active participants in concept-testing with customers
· Facilitating an ideation session where executives pool their observations to form a go-forward plan
The year was 1996. I was working for TRW in the real estate information business, and we were eyeing the mortgage industry segment as a growth segment. Our thinking was that we managed databases that cataloged consumer credit, property valuation and title, so we were in an ideal position to automate the underwriting component of mortgage origination. Our question was not, “Can we do this,” but “Will the market embrace TRW as a company repositioning itself as more than a data vendor?” In 1996 the mortgage industry was made up of numerous companies jockeying for the role as “automation enabler” in mortgage origination. We were one of many.
TRW was a big ship and to steer 90 degrees right-rudder, we needed buy-in from all hands. Our division president was on board, but we had a dozen or so executives who needed to understand and embrace the vision. We chose the 1996 Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Conference as our research venue and retained Grant Thornton to help us set up interviews with industry thought-leaders.
We reserved a suite in a nearby hotel and began setting interviews with ratings agency, GSE, mortgage banking and bank executives, and primary dealers issuing mortgage-related securities. We paired our managers into interviewing teams, gave them crash courses in the mortgage finance industry, and matched them to interviewees.
We whittled our vision down to a single page; a pictograph that represented the mortgage finance segment as a hierarchy. At the bottom were the primary sources of information needed to underwrite a loan: credit, collateral and title. Above that was a line separating content from “the deciders”: the underwriters who used the information to give a thumbs-up or –down on a loan deal. At the top of the pictograph were the banks who provided the funds and the buy and sell sides of the secondary market. The operative questions were twofold: can the role of underwriting be automated, and would the market embrace TRW as an “above the line” provider of more than content… could it become “the decider”?
This visual allowed us to cover a lot of ground in the interview. Which segments would drive change in mortgage underwriting? What was each segment’s proper role in the change process? What were the limitations in automated underwriting? What were the risks and who would assume them?
We conducted thirty or so executive interviews in the course of two-and-a-half days. We interviewed in pairs so one person could lead the discussion while the other took notes. Using company executives to conduct the interviews helped everyone internalize the opportunity and uncover new information from a multi-disciplinary perspective, while advancing the company’s understanding of the mortgage finance industry.
The conference ended Wednesday morning, but we stayed for an additional day to debrief as a team. We hired a moderator to keep us on track and ensure that we had a detailed list of action items. The meeting ended with a consensus and a mandate: we had identified a valid strategic opportunity and we must concentrate our efforts to make it a reality.
There are many ways to conduct research that identifies or validates business opportunities. I am particularly fond of this method. As a team we rolled up our sleeves, got our hands dirty and, by doing so, made the information real. It gave us a sense of ownership in the discovery process. And it generated momentum for the change process.
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