- What are some of the common marketing mistakes that you might make as you journey from the early adopter buyer to finding the mainstream customer? Steve Blank in his book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" talked about a process that paralleled product development.
- He called the process customer development. He said that marketers could use this process to discover and validate who are the best customers and markets for the product that engineering was actually developing?
- The problem is that many startups forget about that second process and focus solely on product development. So marketing actually follows the cadence of product development starting with products that start to take shape and start to near the end of their development cycle.
- When that's starting to happen, typically, a marketing organization will start creating marketing materials around the product, marcom materials to communicate the value of the product and the features of the product.
- They'll start to develop positioning on how the product is best positioned both to the customer and also from a competitive standpoint. The problem is with this process is that they're doing this based solely on the vision of the founders of the company. There hasn't been any interaction with customers.
- As a product reaches its final stages of development, and you start to test it, and it reaches beta test where it's actually introduced to maybe a few customers.
- There, marketing thinks we need to ratchet up our efforts here. We need to hire a PR agency because we need to create buzz around this product such that we'll be able to hit the road running once the product is launched.
- For product launch, now we have a product that's ready to enter the market, but we still haven't talked to any customers, so it feels like it might be a little premature to actually launch the product. But, we still continue forward blindly with a launch event that creates a big splash around the product.
- We talk to analysts. We talk to press. We talk about the product, but we talk about it purely from a product-centric standpoint. There's really no mention of customers. At the same time, marketing is starting other efforts around demand generation. The problem that we have here is that, again, we don't really know who the customer is, but yet we're doing these mass market outreach such that we're looking for a broad array of different types of customers, and ultimately, we don't resonate with any one of them.
- A lot of times that problem happens where you ignore the customer development process and you focus purely on the product process because many hires within the startup organization sometimes come from a bigger company, and a bigger company ties to product development because they already know who their customer is and what markets they're attacking.
- Remember as a startup, your basic mission in these early stages are to validate a set of guesses about who will be the best customer to buy your product, and ultimately, many of them will prove out to be incorrect. So it's really not about what you know from a marketing process standpoint.
- It's about your ability to learn from this and then develop marketing around that. As such, when you start building out your marketing organization, you probably also borrow job titles from bigger companies who, again, have a known business model. So don't confuse job titles with what really needs to be done.
- At the end of the day, you need a team of people that are solely looking at customer discovery, and that means that they probably have to wear multiple hats. more importantly, again, because guesses don't always work out, they have to be able to adapt to change in your strategy.
- One change in that strategy is how do you reach out to customers? You shouldn't be marketing in a vacuum if you don't know who your real customers are. People are very quick to start to try to leverage different types of digital marketing tools to do that. So your shotgunning now within a market, but your customers really don't understand what the value of your product is to their environment. So don't market without customer feedback.
- The other things is when you think about feedback, don't listen to the wrong customer. If you're making the transition from the early adopter to the pragmatist buyer, you can't listen to the visionary customers about what they continue to need and want because that gives you no insight to what the mainstream customer wants. And ultimately, that doesn't allow you to cross the chasm to the bigger market.
- The other thing that you can't do is you can't live in your own world as a company. I had a great sales mentor who once said that you need to get into the world of your customer, understand what makes them tick. What's their pain points? What's their challenges? Ultimately, what will your solution mean to them? So don't confuse the compelling reason to buy with the compelling reason to sell. It's not about the fact that you need to close a deal to make your quota this quarter. It's about how do you help your customer actually solve their problems?
- Selling is your problem. It's not the customer's. Along with that is when you think about having to make a sales quota. Well, that's probably because you're now focused on executing a business plan. Startups, remember, are in search for a business plan. Remember, failure is inherent in that process, so you have to continue to adapt and learn along the way. Failing to adapt is another big mistake that some startup organizations make. In summary, get into the world of your customer.
- Understand their behavior, their challenges and their pain point. Test your customer theories with a customer development process that parallels your product development process. Finally, embrace your startup status. Ignore the fact that maybe you came from a big company. Remember that you're searching for a business plan, not executing one.
