Thoughts, ideas, and lessons learned from real-world customer engagements and interactions...
Are you selling what your customers are truly buying?
31 Mar 2010 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customers
Are you selling yourself short? Do you know and understand what your customers are truly buying from you?
Let me give a bit of background information…one of our current customers is a very specialized service provider who has been around for 20 years solely focused on servicing a very specific industry. Although they do not produce any intellectual property (software), they have been the sales and support partners for industry specific financial systems for many years. As the sales and support company, they not only resell the software, they also provide all of the implementation support, training, technical support, etc.
As part of the Ideas2Revenue process, we spent some time with this client to better understand their offering, current customers, implementation processes, etc. However, the main thing that we try to pull out in this initiation meeting is to have our client articulate the value that they believe that they are providing to their customers. So, this client told us everything about the software solution that they were selling. They told us about how modern the solution is compared to the competition, how the software package is user friendly, etc. However, not once did they talk about the value that they as an organization provided to their clients. In many ways, they were often reducing the price of their own services and implementation support in order to help drive the software licensing deals.
Getting clear on your target!
9 Feb 2010 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Development, Marketing
Last week I had the opportunity to once again present the “Accelerating To First Customers” session at the Lead To Win program. As always, this fantastic program had some of the greatest new companies in Ottawa participating.
One of the key things that I cover in this session is how to get crystal clear on the true target market for your product or service. This is one of the core fundamentals of any business no matter their size, maturity, etc. It does not matter if you are a start-up who is going through the Customer Development and Lean Startup processes or if you are an existing company that has some great sales results already on the scoreboard. If you do not get this step right, then the list of potential problems ranging from spending precious marketing dollars on marketing to the wrong audience all the way through to even developing a solution that is not truly needed by the market can present itself. The ripple effect of this core mistake can be felt right across the whole company and the problems will present itself in many different forms.
I have done previous posts on this topic so I will not repeat any of these. However, there are two sources of additional information that I have come across and I wanted to share regarding this topic. First, if you are a follower of the Lean Startup and Customer Development methodologies then you may have heard of Giff Constable who is the CEO of a new upcoming start-up company called Aprizi. If you are not familiar with him then be sure to check out his blog. He just did a recent post entitled Targeting Matters! which I think is worth the read.
Come on – why would they want to help us?
24 Jan 2010 | No Comments | posted by admin | in Customer Development, Requirements Gathering
This week as we kicked off an engagement with a new client, we went through the typical kick-off meeting where we discuss more about their solution and our process. We explain the high level concepts of the Customer Development process and how we fit in to this methodology with our process of identifying, contacting, and collaborating with potential clients of their solution. And just like clockwork, the standard question came out…”Why would these companies and the key decision makers within these companies want to help us?”
The answer to this question in many ways is simple. However, it is only once we have had the opportunity to explain it to the client does it truly appear to be simple. The following is how we approach answering this question, and hopefully it may be able to help you as part of your Customer Development process….
