Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa Software, explains why spending too much time with existing customers kills breakthrough innovation, but ignoring them entirely means you miss what actually works. He argues for balancing both, letting customers and prospects learn from each other to build real platform value.
If you spend too much time with customers, yes they could become the only group that influences what you develop and you're never going to have the iPhone, right? I mean that's the example right? You spend too much time with prospects you're going to forget about what actually matters on the ground. So you have to balance that and I think it's really nice to have that interplay because you're interacting with the customer. You're hearing about challenges as well as successes and and you're taking that to the conversation with the prospect also sharing the challenges as well as the successes that you're having and then it's a real conversation. It's not the 1990s PowerPoint and demo and then good luck and we'll see in three years. It's we're actually going to make this work together join our community of like minded folks that want to drive value on the platform we're developing. So you have to be throttling back and forth.
