Marketing
Getting clear on your target!
09/02/10 13:18
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.
Second, during the recent presentation that I did with the Lead To Win program, I had them conduct an exercise. The exercise was simply to write to themselves a thank-you letter from one of their hypothetical customers. I first learned about this item from the Lean Startup Wiki and a post Kent Beck did on his blog Three Rivers Institute. This was a great tool to not only help to get people approaching their solution from the customers perspective (the only one that matters), but also to begin identifying the true target market for their solution. In this letter they were asked to write it from the perspective of their "ideal" customer, and were to focus on the benefits (not features) of the solution that they provided to the customer. I found that this was a great tool.
So, are you 100% crystal clear on your target market? If you are not sure, then now is the time to get clear. One way to find out is to write yourself a hypothetical thank you letter from one of your customers.
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.
Second, during the recent presentation that I did with the Lead To Win program, I had them conduct an exercise. The exercise was simply to write to themselves a thank-you letter from one of their hypothetical customers. I first learned about this item from the Lean Startup Wiki and a post Kent Beck did on his blog Three Rivers Institute. This was a great tool to not only help to get people approaching their solution from the customers perspective (the only one that matters), but also to begin identifying the true target market for their solution. In this letter they were asked to write it from the perspective of their "ideal" customer, and were to focus on the benefits (not features) of the solution that they provided to the customer. I found that this was a great tool.
So, are you 100% crystal clear on your target market? If you are not sure, then now is the time to get clear. One way to find out is to write yourself a hypothetical thank you letter from one of your customers.
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Bridging the gap...
17/06/09 20:12
A few hours later I started to think about this statement a bit more. There were a few things that started to jump out at me regarding the statement. In regards to market analysis, there are many organizations and people that can help a company to do this important and necessary exercise. Anyone can easily analyze the market, strategies, pricing models, competitors....anything. On the flip side of this coin, commercialization is just as important to any business as the reality is that you do not have a business until you release your product or service to the market for people to purchase.
Now the interesting part of this is that the “bridging” is the key to success. You can do analysis on many different aspects of your business, but it is not until you cross the bridge to commercialization does any of that matter. Also, you can take any idea to market if you have enough persistence, time, and money, however it is not until you cross the bridge to connecting it with your market analysis (a true understanding of your target market, and their needs) do you truly begin to make profitable, repeatable, and predictable sales results.
So, take some time to think about this analogy and determine if you have built a good bridge for this gap within your company. If you are not sure if you have a bridge or even if you need to update or fix your bridge, the only true indicator is in your sales results. If sales are on track and you are making money....chances are you have built a good bridge. If however you are not seeing the results that you desire, then the first thing you need to do is see if your product or services (commercialization) is cut off and isolated from your target market, their requirements, and their needs (market analysis). If your not quite sure where to go or how to do this....then give us a call as we have already built a number of these bridges for our clients already.