I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mark Vandeneijnde of Zürich, Switzerland. Mark is the co-founder of the global assessment and coaching organization BEING At Full Potential, a fascinating company that specializes in assessing and unlocking human potential in organizations. 

SurveyGold Provides an Effective and Efficient Quantitative Assessment Tool

Mark uses SurveyGold to underpin a Human Potential Assessment Tool used by business leaders who want to deliver more value from their organizations. Mark uses the insights gathered and analyzed by SurveyGold to help business leaders better understand and act on the untapped human potential in their organizations.

I asked Mark about the business problem he was solving using SurveyGold. He tells me, "We needed to develop a quantitative assessment tool that could accurately measure performance in this area and put the necessary data on the table to enable the right conversations. We also needed an effective way to distribute the survey and analyze the data afterwards. Without SurveyGold, the efficient delivery of our assessment tool would not have been possible. We are very satisfied with the SurveyGold solution. It is user-friendly, flexible, cost effective and the customer support is excellent. We feel very happy to have made this choice."

Emphasizing the HEART in Business

I also discovered that BEING At Full Potential acknowledges the importance of "HEART" in business. The following video is a summary of the research Mark has done recently. It serves to put some meat on this broad and fuzzy topic. Mark's hope is that it opens a conversation on how more "HEART" can concretely benefit your organization. I found the topic to be very insightful and interesting.  

Relying Purely on Intuition, Experience and Mind-Reading Proved Unfruitful

At first, prior to using SurveyGold, Katy tried a reasonable and well-intentioned approach to designing new tools. To be sure, Katy has a lot of experience to draw upon. She has penned a career advice column for 15+ years and was named one of five top career counselors in the United States by the National Career Development Association. She also holds a Master of Education degree from Colorado State University in Vocational Education, Career Development and Career Counseling. 

Despite her best efforts, she reports that her efforts meet with frustration.

This ultimately leads her to consider using a more effective and efficient market-driven approach to gaining the understanding required to develop solutions that resonate with her market.

Regrouping: LEAN Development with a Specific Kind of Survey Tool in Mind

Katy shifts gears and decides to use a LEAN development methodology to gain new insights into the problems in the market. Surveys are a crucial part of the process. Yet, when it comes time to pick a survey tool, she has a very specific set of requirements and apprehensions.

Using SurveyGold: Quick and Easy Survey Creation and Deployment

SurveyGold proves to be her selection. Despite having no prior experience using survey tools, Katy designs and deploys surveys with nary a learning curve.

Katy finds her key to success when she begins to engage people experiencing the problems she wants to solve. She uses SurveyGold web survey forms to quickly and affordably collect input from people. The results give her confidence and efficiency in her product design decisions.

Gaining Insight from People in the Market: Key to Product Success

In the final analysis, Katy learns a lesson that inside-out thinking pales in comparison to the outside-in insight gained from engaging people in the market who have real problems.

For the record, I'm a big fan of Pragmatic Marketing. Pragmatic teaches companies how to build and market products people want to buy. (Disclaimer: I'm professionally certified in the fundamentals of the Pragmatic Marketing Framework for market-driven product management. I haven't arrived yet. I'm a work-in-progress, learning every day.) 

One of the key concepts that Pragmatic Marketing teaches product managers is to shift from thinking inside-out to thinking outside-in. An inside-out idea is one that you come up with yourself, in the shower, on the treadmill, or in a meeting room behind closed doors. In contrast, an outside-in idea is an insight that you gain by observing and engaging people with problems in their native habitat.

Katy now fully appreciates the value of gathering insight through the use of online surveys. SurveyGold survey tools provide her with an affordable and efficient means of collecting invaluable market insight. Her story is the essence of why SurveyGold exists.

I am delighted that SurveyGold is contributing to Katy Piotrowski's success and to the success of Career Solutions Group. My thanks to Katy for allowing me to retell her story. Using an outside-in approach increases the likelihood that the final product truly resonates with people in the market.

SurveyGold survey solutions provide The Ohio State University Extension with an important data collection and analysis tool by which to implement the Ohio Business Retention & Expansion (BR&E) Program. The ability to conduct surveys in a variety of ways, to collect data at a county level as well as state-wide level and to perform analysis using the weighting index features of SurveyGold have helped to make the program an ongoing success.

The Ohio BR&E Program provides the resources, training, and tools to develop the capacity of the community to better understand its economy. 

In addition to enhanced community capacity to address critical community issues, other outcomes of such community engagement include a streamlined BR&E process that enables local leaders to focus on planning, action and results; a database of local information; and a more robust local economy. Nearly nine out of ten members have rated the program as 'HIGH VALUE.'

Communities that actively implement an on-going BR&E program focusing on the retention and expansion of local businesses will:

• Improve the business climate of the community
• Help to make local businesses remain competitive
• Increase employment
• Stabilize the local economy

More information about the Ohio BR&E Program is available via their website.