I learned there is a new practice emerging among large 3D printer manufacturers: customer screening.
There seems to be a slow evolution of how 3D printer manufacturers relate to their customers, and the latest development establishes a new level.
But let’s get back to the beginning so you can see how practices have evolved. I’ve seen this lifecycle take place for over a decade, and every 3D printer company goes through this sequence.
At the beginning, the machines are designed and built, usually without a specific application in mind. The company’s initial goal is often to simply “sell boxes”. I always ask companies to tell me the applications of their equipment, and am told “it can be used for anything”.
Some time later, the 3D printer manufacturers realize that companies in certain industries are buying their system more than other industries. The customers have discovered the system is valuable. At that point, the companies often set up marketing towards that industry and application. Sometimes there is even a department dedicated to educating people in that industry.
Even later, the 3D printer manufacturers discover that their customers in that industry don’t always understand the best ways of using the equipment, and are leaving benefits behind. Sometimes this causes the customer’s venture into 3D printing to fail, and they are no longer a customer.
To counteract this, 3D printer manufacturers at this stage then develop application support departments that will work hand-in-hand with the customer to jointly develop applications that are high performing and very beneficial to the customer. Since the customer is then able to have a solution that truly works, they tend to buy more equipment and materials when exercising that solution.
That’s the lifecycle as I’ve known it for some years. But last week at Rapid+TCT I learned there is a new, further stage that a very few 3D printer manufacturers are beginning to use: screening.
They’ve discovered that it’s not enough to simply work with the customers on 3D print applications. That’s because it turns out that some customers are actually hard to work with. It could be that there are personality issues, or more typically fundamental challenges within customer organizations that could make progress difficult. This lowers the likelihood of success for a given project.
The new approach is to “screen” the customers before engaging in partnerships to develop new 3D print applications. This does two things: it increases the probability of success of a given application, and secondly it reduces the failures that could occur.
The latter is quite important, as failures are facts that can travel between customers and prospects. Would you buy a solution that didn’t work for another company? Would you buy a solution that did work for another company?
You can see how powerful this approach could be.
This is quite a sophisticated approach, and will surely increase the success of any 3D printer manufacturer using it. While there are very few using it today, I expect this to rapidly emerge at many other 3D printer manufacturers over the next few years.
