How to Apply a Minimum Buyable Mindset to Boost Buyer Confidence

While services companies have traditionally placed great emphasis on process and quality elements for their clients, these aspects are now taken for granted, so suppliers need new ways to improve customer engagement.

Today, there is a real need to focus on innovation, time to market, and the use of new technologies, so a paradigm shift needs to occur if outsourcing companies want to provide the best skills to develop new solutions.

New tech companies have begun using methods such as minimum viable products, design thinking, design sprints, and innovation games, among others. These approaches help to focus on identifying the real needs of the user by creating prototypes and experimenting with different scenarios to solve any given problem.

This change is huge, because it adds an element of chaos and unpredictability, rather than the usual deterministic ways of doing things.

Evolved Approach to Training

With that in mind, new training needs to be introduced for all participants involved in the product design, not only for the developer, but also the customer, the executives, and all the people involved in the supply chain.

Since the supplier’s focus is on productivity, time to market, quality, and feasibility, we need to figure out how to bring fresh ideas and discover people with high potential to integrate into our teams.

In this way, working with students or those just leaving college using an informal interaction like a hackathon we are able to solve challenges and find solutions through their experimentation, which we can then integrate on the fly.

The approach has been great, because business people are usually very busy and focused on meeting deadlines, while students are fresh and open to explore new avenues that are sometimes crazy and unthinkable, but can often lead to a complete shift in business practices.

The Minimum Buyable Mindset

In order to change how things are done, break paradigms, and transform how people think, we have created a concept called The Minimum Buyable Mindset.

This concept is based on the fact that the technology is evolving faster that we can sometimes handle, so coping with the learning process can be a challenge. To overcome that hurdle, we need to focus on finding the best problem solvers around.

The next step is to experiment with how to solve those problems, while at the same time working with extended teams of students that can bring new knowledge to the table and challenge the status quo.

At that stage, we can decide which of these new elements add value to the usual activities, and can also be considered positive, transformative parts of the business.

However, in order to successfully integrate the Minimum Buyable Mindset, you need to develop your team’s soft skills, such as decision-making, managing uncertainty, risk assessment, problem solving, learning to learn, and leadership. These soft skills enable people to learn faster and use the acquired knowledge on the fly.

When you implement a Minimum Buyable Mindset as part of your day-to-day, you are mixing innovation with well-structured processes. It is a unique approach that provides a huge competitive advantage for you, and will help your business to keep growing skills and capabilities all the time.