- The best piece of advice I can give to a startup is know your customer.If you think about your startup environment, the product that your startup is building is really the brainchild of the founder.It's your job and your responsibility to match that product to the best possible customer and market, so that you can build now a scalable and successful business.
- Just remember, though, you're not gonna find how to do that, or you're not gonna figure out how to do that by staying in the building.There's no answer within your conference rooms of the building that you currently occupy.In fact, Steve Blank also gives us the advice in his book,"The Four Steps to the Epiphany" to get outside.Don't sit in your office, go outside and talk to customers learn what makes them tick, learn what their problems are, what their challenges are.
- And also you'll figure out along the way, how you can actually solve those problems with your product.Now, the fact that a lot of marketers don't go actually out into the field and talk to customers is probably a reason why a lot of their materials are ineffective. A recent study showed that almost 60 to 70% of content created for the B2B market, or the business-to-business market goes unused.
- And primarily it goes unused because it's just not relevant to the customers world. So what is relevant to customers? One is what are the news and the trends that are affecting their company? Affecting their jobs?
- Secondly, is how can they be educated about solutions that may exist in the market, to problems that they have or problems that other light companies have solved? Entertainment is a nice thing to have, but it's primarily probably better suited for the consumer market.
- However, some entertainment is probably a good way for customers to take notice of a new company that's emerging in the market.What don't they wanna know about? Well, they don't wanna know about really your company and how great it is. And they also don't wanna know about just the products and the product capabilities that you're building.
- They wanna know about solutions and how you can solve their business problems so they can be successful in their jobs. Now, the biggest tool that you have at your disposal is just getting out and actually having a discussion or an interview with your customers.
- Cintell found that over 80% of the companies that use this technique typically exceeded their revenue goals for a particular market, so it's highly effective. But when you talk to a particular prospect, go beyond their demographics, don't necessarily just identify them based on how big they are.
- Are they the Fortune 2000? Are they a smaller, medium-sized enterprise? What industry or vertical do they operate? Are they a North American company or what other geo do they operate in
- Really what you wanna typically understand is what sort of makes up the company? In terms of how are they organized? Who are the influencers? Who are the decision-makers? And also you wanna recognize the various issues and trends that affect them and also affect their jobs.
- Now, we think about "Crossing the Chasm" Geoffrey Moore gives us a nine-point checklist to go through a process where we can understand fully what appeals to a customer. So evaluate buying behavior around these nine points. Talk about who the target customer is, talk about why they have a compelling reason to buy your product.
- But talk about the whole product, in other words, what needs to be coupled with your product to make it a solution? Talk about the partners and the allies that are needed to actually develop a whole product. How are you gonna distribute the product? What channels are you gonna utilize? Talk about pricing of the product both to the end user and also pricing that will be successful in a channel environment, and then finally talk about the competition and how you're gonna position against them.
- Ultimately, what you wanna be able to do, to create a scalable market is to also identify the next target. Who are the likely buyers after your current buyer? Or your first buyer that you're identifying here. So how do you go about getting customer attention?
- First of all, remember that it's a journey, a buying journey for the customer, from initial awareness of a problem to actually buying a solution is typically a six to nine-month process. So when you think about marketing, don't think about campaigns, think about a conversation that will be heard during that entire journey.
- Focus on customers not products. You're the hero of the story is not the product, it's actually the customer that's implementing a solution. And then doing so tell them a story about how your solution will help them but not only help them but prove that it's helped others.
- Finally, you can specialize in your message such that it will resonate with a particular buyer by focusing on a target niche.And then finally, as I said before, it's a six to nine-month process just for the buying process
