So I came up with 8 steps, which is 2 whole steps easier than 10!

But seriously, people.  I love Twitter, use it daily, and there is simply no doubt that I have benefited from using it.  Depending on your business, not only might you  benefit, too, but it might be required practice for you to be successful.

So if you have not taken the dive into Twitter, forget all the negativity you’ve heard and read on.

1. Determine why you want to use Twitter

I use Twitter for the following reasons (in no particular order):

• Build my brand
• Learn what to read from people I respect (I no longer visit my “blogroll”)
• “Socialize” (in a very broad definition of the term) with “real” people
• Participate & nourish specific communities, e.g, the San Diego tech scene
• Indirectly (mostly) sell products and services

I’m guessing some of your ambitions might fall within that list, but regardless, know what you want to get out of using Twitter.

2. Choose a client

I strongly recommend you don’t use Twitter’s web client.  In my view, you’ll be more successful if you segregate your Twitter feeds based loosely on the objectives you determined in Step 1.  I use TweetDeck and have used HootSuite in the past.

3. Follow

Follow people who will help you meet your objectives. Follow writers, journalists and bloggers you read, thought-leaders in subject matters you care about, and other influencers whom you think might tweet interesting stuff.  Don’t be concerned if they don’t follow you back.  Follow colleagues, peers, casual acquaintances and friends, but only those that are interested in or are somehow related to subject matters that concern you.

You can follow people outside those parameters, too, but be prepared for tweets that fit the Twitter cliche, e.g., “I’m flossing, but just can’t loosen that piece of beef stuck between the cuspid and first premolar.”

4. Create lists

Lists allow you to group tweeters by subject matter and “Tweetability”.  (Twitter allows you to NOT follow people, yet include them in your lists, which is patently absurd and leads to gaming of follows.  But that’s a different topic altogether.)  Create one list for your “Top Tweeters.”  I call mine “Watch” and I keep it private, in other words, others cannot see its members.  I put people in the list whom I am confident I want to read their tweets.  They are people I respect, thought leaders, influencers or simply good tweeters.  New tweeters have to earn their way onto the list.  Crappy tweeters who also happen to be “people I respect, thought leaders or influencers” are removed from the list.

I also have a list for people who tweet politics, tweeters based in Southern California, and news feeds.

Dave Churchville: In awe (with a tinge of fear) of the sheer number of columns in @brantcooper ‘s TweetDeck

5. Columnize your feed

Columns turn your massive, undifferentiated stream into digestible, information sources.  In TweetDeck, I have a column each for my lists:  ”watch”, politics, socal tweeps, and the newsfeed.  I also have a column for the standard Twitter feeds Mentions (of me), Direct Messages and “All Friends.”  Finally, I created 2 columns based on custom search queries:  tweets that mention hashtags #custdev or #leanstartup; and tweets about “San Diego startups.”  The number of tweets in each column is actually pretty easy to follow.

6. Commit

A change in behavior can’t happen by casually “checking it out.”  So maybe you don’t want to change your behavior.  But you don’t even know if that’s true until you truly give something new a shot.  Commit time to check your feed everyday for 2 weeks.  I don’t care if it’s only for 15 minutes.  Read tweets, read recommended posts, learn something new.

7. Engage at your own pace

Don’t tweet for the sake of tweeting.  Seriously, just don’t.  RT something you like.  Reply to a tweet if you have something to say.  You might not find your voice in the first 2 weeks, but who cares?  If you find what you receive valuable, you’ll come back.  Eventually you’ll figure how to give value.

8. Manage your feed

Graduate Tweeps from your All Friends and search columns to your Watch (Top Tweeters) list as needed.  Demote others.  You don’t have to unfollow, but if there is absolutely zero value to the Tweets AND no other value to keeping these people on your follow list, unfollow them.  You might want to follow people who are influential to you in some way, but they might suck at Twitter.  So keep them in the All Friends list.  You don’t have to worry about insulting them by unfollowing, but they won’t clutter your feed if you’re managing your lists well.

To be honest, I look at the “All Friends” feed the least. The most noise comes from the custom query columns.  But I find these easy to ignore, since my other lists contain the Tweeps I want to hear from.

For most people, the most difficult part is just getting started.  I’ve purposefully not addressed the etiquette of social media, providing value and all that, because that’s been written about several times before and is something you can worry about after you get going.  I hope to simply help you get going.  Start small, differentiate your feeds, commit to a small amount of time everyday for 2 weeks.

Let me know how it’s going!

• surveys
• automated customer feedback mechanisms (e.g., uservoice, get satisfaction, et. al.)
• embedded product use analytics
• marketing analytics
• feature request mechanisms
• sales calls
• product demo
• usability testing
• focus groups

Each has its place in the Customer Development process, but without live Customer Development Conversations, you are likely compromising your ability to learn your way to Product-Market fit or startup scaling.  What you seek to learn evolves over time, as do the tactics you employ, but every step of the way should be grounded in real time conversations.

Generally speaking:

Pre-Problem-Solution Fit, you concentrate on learning as much as you can about the problem, who are the real customers (user? buyer? boss?), and possible solutions.

Pre-Minimum Viable Product, you concentrate of learning, developing and testing the minimum features and functionality required o solve the problem to a degree the customer will buy.

Pre-Product-Market Fit, you concentrate on learning about funnels, testing messaging and positioning, and likely iterating on product and market segment in search of P-M fit.

The conversation itself is difficult for many. The key to effective conversations is in developing the conversation around your objectives for the discussion.  Establish 3 or 4 “must learns” for each conversation.  Depending on what you’re trying to learn, you can use “open-ended” questions and direct questions.  Use your conversations to calibrate your other tactics.  Are you asking the right questions in your surveys?  Do responses gibe?  Are product demos necessary from the buyer’s perspective?   Are users using the product the way they say they want to?

I thought I’d share some recent experiences my clients have had with customer development conversations to help illustrate conversation tactics.

1. Talk problem first, not solution.

Client: “I can’t stop talking about the solution.  It’s how the conversation starts.”

Clearly, whenever you meet someone for the first time, you need to introduce the space your product is in.  You must provide a context for the conversation.   You need to be able to state what you’re about succinctly, so you can move on to the purpose of the meeting.  Otherwise, you spend the whole time trying to explain what you’re doing.  This is why the elevator pitch is so important.   In a conversation, you don’t necessarily repeat the pitch verbatim, but you use components of it to steer the conversation.  So, for example, if you are testing your problem assumptions, use a classic sales cold call method of “flipping” the conversation from talking about yourself (solution) to the customer (problem):

Hi, I’m Brant Cooper from Market By Numbers, and I teach Founders Customer Development principles to help get their startups off the ground; (intro that provides context)

I often hear from startup CEOs like yourself, (The Flip)

That they have trouble figuring out how to prove their business model and how to prioritize what they should be working on; (problem hypotheses)

Do you experience this at all? (Open ended question)

Follow up questions depend on the answer.  If answer is no, you might say: “That’s great, it sounds like you have things under control. “What are the primary issues you face as CEO?” or “Do you hear other CEOs that talk about these issues?”

2. Except when that doesn’t work.

Client: “I couldn’t get her to describe her pain.  She kept wanting to know how she could help me!”

The contact was a senior person in the exact type of company needed to confirm a key hypothesis.  My solution would help her company’s relationship with its clients, but I couldn’t get her to talk about that.  Instead, she talked about problems her clients had and the opportunities available to solve them.  I asked if she was a sales person and it turns out she was.    I said it sounds like she’s a good sales person, who understands the needs of her clients, and a good contact, but not his customer. I suggested my client ask her to refer him to her company’s product managers who would be more likely to be interested in his ideas.  “More contacts to speak with” should always be a core objective.

If a problem statement doesn’t resonate, either your problem statement is not articulated correctly, is flat out wrong, or you are not talking to the your customer.

3. This is not feature mongering.

Client: “Conversation inevitably turns to features discussion.”

If you are talking about features, see 1. above.  If your contact or customer is talking features, slow it down by by asking why.  Use the same 5-whys approach Eric Ries talks about to discover a problem in your development process to figure out what is driving the feature request.  Continue to ask why the customer wants specific functionality until they are able to tell you the actual problem they’re trying to solve.  This helps you consider a couple of things.  First, is the feature a high priority to the customer?  Second, are you building the right Minimum Viable Product?  Obviously, one data point is not enough to draw conclusions, but it contributes to the analysis.

4. How to test messaging.

Client: “Can’t I just A/B test?”

It’s fine to use split testing to test messaging, but it’s most effective when you’re optimizing your funnel. If you do it too early, you actually don’t know if you are optimizing for the right product and market.  Also, you can find out that one message works better than another, but you can’t learn why.  In a live conversation, not only can you ask why a message doesn’t work, but you can test several iterations in the same conversation.   When testing messages live, I like to use the “pause method.”

5. Ask them.

Client: “Everyone says I need Facebook, Twitter, a blog.  How do I know?”

If there are two things the world doesn’t need more of, they are Internet Marketers and Social Media Gurus. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and clearly Internet and social media marketing can be effective.  But their effectiveness depends less on which expert you hire than whether your customer and their buying process intersect with your online tactics.  I spoke with a CEO recently who had two B2B deals in pilot for his new startup.  He had personally orchestrated the sales process through 1-1 relationship building in a carefully honed market segment. Yet his marketing plan called for Internet and social media marketing that didn’t jive with his experience.  He immediately described a shotgun approach to figure out what the right online channels would be.  While it might be the case that online marketing would be successful and even necessary to scale, at that time all evidence pointed to offline methods.  Using the “Flipping the Funnel” idea, I recommended he Ask his existing customers!  Here’s a question you can ask straight out to your contacts:  Do you belong to social networks?  Do influence your buying decisions? What blogs do you read, etc.

I hope you find this helpful.  What issues do you encounter during your Customer Development Conversations?

I’ve written about market segmentation before both on this blog and as an important concept to understand in The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development. I think it is vital to grasp because it’s fundamental to achieving Product-Market fit and building a scalable business. I’m writing about it again because it has come to my attention that I have perhaps not explained one of its primary precepts well enough.

As I wrote before, Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm defined a market segment as:

* a set of actual or potential customers
* for a given set of products or services
* who have a common set of needs or wants, and
* who reference each other when making a buying decision.

Most of this is pretty intuitive. In a nutshell, a market segment is comprised of like buyers who share the same pain. But there’s more to it. The reference part trips some people up. The key point to understand is that the customers and potential buyers must be willing AND able to reference each other.

This doesn’t mean that two customers need to know each other or even speak to one another, but simply that one respects the opinion of the other for a particular purchasing decision and that somehow the sharing of that opinion happens. Go to any well-marketed B2B web site and you’ll see case studies of successful customer implementations, often arranged by vertical industry, because the decision maker in one company likely respects his or her counterpart’s decision making about specific products.

Note that verticals are not necessary to define segments, since for some products, buyers may not consider industry a significant factor. Same holds true for other classic market segment variables, such as geography and buyer profile (gender, age, income, etc.). Those factors may come into play, but only as defined by “willing AND able to reference each other.”

One can quickly understand the tremendous importance of social media marketing within the context of market segments. Facebook’s “Like” feature by itself instantly expands the scope of “sharing a reference” by several orders of magnitude.

Market Segments and Product-Market Fit

As you search for Product-Market Fit, you are likely to investigate multiple market segments. Ideally, you want to reach Sean Ellis’ 40% “very disappointed” metric in one segment. In other words, if you have achieved 40% across your user base, you still need to segment those users and measure within the segments.   You don’t want to find yourself in the situation of treating a group of users who are only willing to pay $5/mo — or nothing at all — with one willing to pay more.   By segmenting those users, you might discover a lower score among the group you assumed you were targeting. Or you might find your 40% “very disappointed” is in a segment that is ridiculously small or has no money. In this case, you might choose to continue to work to get over 40% in the more promising segment.

Market Segments and the Scalable Business

Simplistically speaking, your Startup becomes a scalable startup when you have learned how to acquire and convert a big (or multiple) market segments.  If you are raising money, part of your story should be detailing your target segment and how you will convert its members, as well as how winning this segment will lead to a scalable business.
As in the diagram to the left, you might find that your total addressable market (TAM) can be split into various segments.  The TAM includes all users who share a problem to some degree and who you believe will be receptive to your solution.  The level of pain might differ, however, between some identifiable groups of users.  The features required in the solution might also differ.  Further, who the buyer is, who they consider trustworthy references, and how they are acquired and converted (funnel) are likely not the same across all the groups.

Your growth strategy — how you build a scalable business model — will depend on your strategy to capture these segments.   Best practices dictate that you choose and focus on 1 segment at a time, the reasoning being that 1) you don’t have the resources to tackle specific functionality required by the different segments; and 2) you don’t have the resources to acquire and convert multiple funnels simultaneously.

Whether this is truly best practices depends on your startup.  How different are the feature requirements?  How different are the funnels?  How much bleed over into adjacent segments does your social media marketing provide?   For web-based business models anyway, as the costs of online marketing have decreased and the ability to track the return on your marketing dollars has increased, the need to focus on only 1 segment has diminished.  (When you are  first starting out, however, there’s still a lot of benefit to the learning that is accomplished by focusing on narrowly drawn segments.)

The one core principle that remains, however, is to focus on one core value proposition. If you start selling to a segment with a different need or change the product for a group of users because they’re solving a different pain, in actuality you are “pivoting.”   In this case, you are better off not serving multiple masters and must “fail one” in order to pursue another.

Market Segments and Early Adopters

Early Adopters are not a segment unto themselves.  Early adopters are those prospective customers who readily recognize the problem you are trying to solve and are often looking for solutions for themselves.  Early Adopters are important since they are likely closer to the pain then you are and will help modify and validate your core customer-problem-solution assumptions.   They will also likely champion your product if you are successful at solving their problem and will form the base of core passionate users you seek that determine Product-Market Fit.  In the early going, you will likely find that your early adopters represent different segments and you will eventually disappoint some of them.

I hope this clarifies some of my past writing on market segments.  What has been your experience?

Before you hire a PR agency or even consider PR, the first thing you need to understand is what you are trying to accomplish, what is your objective.  Second, you should consider whether that objective is right for the stage of your business.  If you are an early startup, pre Product-Market fit, or even pre “Sales and Marketing Roadmap,” you should not hire a PR firm.

Hiring an agency is wrong, because, generally:

• You do not need press releases
• You do not need a campaign blitz of articles and press mentions
• Your PR firm does not know how to do your customer messaging or positioning for you
• Your PR firm should be no where near your social media
• Most PR firms will tell you need all of the above, that they are the experts and you aren’t, and will try to charge you a retainer of at least 5K/month

You do not need press releases.

Do your customers read press releases?  Does anyone?   Press releases were originally intended to notify media of a newsworthy story.  In the high-tech world, releases have been so abused by businesses blasting trivial events on the one side and by media outlets writing “stories” that repeat the content without critique or judgment that the credibility of releases has diminished significantly.  And it’s getting worse.  Online releases are used not to provide notice to interested parties, but rather to generate external links in  order to boost PageRank.  If your objective is the latter, there are several online PR services that will accomplish your goal for a lot less money.

You do not need a campaign blitz of articles and press mentions.

An agency orchestrated analyst and media tour and blogger outreach program is called “awareness” marketing, is intended to create “buzz” about your product and company, and can indirectly lead to increased visits to your web site by prospective customers.  Hiring an agency to lead this effort is still the best way to go, because a good firm not only has a great rolodex of media contacts, but the principals have relationships with the media that mean increased credibility and better press.  The problem is that startups are not ready for the buzz.  You can only launch once and if you blow it, it’s blown.   If your selling process isn’t tuned to your customer’s buying process, if your target market segment isn’t finely tuned, if you product doesn’t provide enough value to retain users and you need to pivot, you’ve likely wasted your one chance at not blowing the Techcrunch bump.

Further, as you grow and learn more about the market, you want to cultivate your own relationships with key figures in your industry.  Since reporters and analysts participate in social media, access to them through your network without the assistance of a PR agency is pretty easy.

PR firms do not know how to do your customer messaging or positioning

I find this one particularly irksome, because PR firms often tout their ability to develop messaging and positioning.   And they can do a good job when targeting the media and analysts. PR firms do not know your products, customers, or competitors.  You do, so it’s your responsibility to learn what messaging and positioning works in your market.   The key verb here is learning. You should be testing your positioning through Customer Development interviews and A/B testing.  There’s a large pool of talented and creative people (including PR professionals) who can help you brainstorm concepts and wordsmith phrases, but outsourcing the effort to an agency is a recipe for bland, undifferentiated marketing-speak.  Further, wrong positioning, like placing you in the wrong market, could ultimately lead to your startup’s demise.

PR firms do not belong any where near your social media

Big companies hire PR agencies to manager their social media streams, because they don’t want to screw up their brand.  It’s spin, baby, spin.  It’s used as a continuation of traditional one-way communication from company to consumer or as a new (mostly) one-way communication from consumer to company black hole.  This is likely not your social media strategy.  Your strategy likely is to belong to a community through active participation (in ways that don’t directly benefit you), and to provide value unique to you and your business.  You might retweet interesting articles that relate to your industry, answer questions unrelated to your business, or even give props to competitors who have done something positive.  Such activity requires intimate knowledge of your products, customers and community and you cannot expect a PR agency to have that level of knowledge.

Most PR firms will tell you need all of the above, that they are the experts and you aren’t, and will try to charge you a retainer of at least 5K/month

PR agencies are in a tough place.  Online PR resources; reporters, analysts and influential bloggers easily accessible to businesses; decreased use of traditional (e.g., print) media; and a legacy of a high-priced retainer fee structure portents poorly for traditional agencies.  Hence the move to make their case as the natural purveyors of social media marketing.  For the reasons given above, however, I beg to differ.

Which isn’t to say, you should never do PR.

At Eric Ries’ Startup Lessons Learned conference last month, I participated on the Customer Development panel and we were asked if PR was ever justified.  While moderator Sean Ellis and fellow-panelist David Binetti rightly pointed you shouldn’t do PR campaigns, as I discuss above, I mentioned that there are ways to use PR activities in “small” ways to help you achieve discrete objectives.  Low-level PR can help build an “expertise reputation” for a Founder without compromising the company.  Low-level PR might help you access specific industry contacts who you feel may be early adopters. The distinction here is that you’re not trying to build “buzz,” but rather are taking discrete steps to achieve a defined objective within the context of the stage of your business.  For these tasks, you can do them yourself or you might hire a PR consultant and pay them by task or by hour.

Finally, some believe that buzz is required to raise capital.  I don’t know, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.  I do know that I’m not sure I would want money from someone who could not see through the ruse of manufactured buzz.

Comments welcome!

The tension comes from learning when to ignore your customers and when to take heed. Custdevguy reminds us that customers have their own agenda, which might not coincide with your own. Steve Blank reminds us that Customer Development is not just collecting web metrics and it’s not about focus groups. I’ve written before that Customers own the pain, Founders own the vision, meaning that as an entrepreneur, you must tailor your vision to solve the customer’s pain. That is the objective of speaking with your customers.

Sean Ellis perhaps says it best, describing the process as “honing in” on the “signal” that is the core value proposition of your product to your customer. What’s valuable about this description to me, is that rather than looking at what you need to ask each customer, it provides a high-level perspective on what your objective should be and how to get there.  It’s talking to enough customer and asking whatever questions necessary to hone in on the core value of the product.

————————–

Back in November, I decided I wanted to go to do something different for the holidays this year; something fun and a little different, and perhaps a little adventurous with my two girls.  I decided that we would go to Seattle to visit my sister and her family, who have kids the same age as mine, and from there we’ll rent a cabin in the woods and go play in the snow.  That was my “vision.”  When I told my kids we were going to visit their cousins in Seattle, they didn’t want to go. Now, I had a pretty good idea why, but I asked anyway and they gave me the ones I guessed, but others I hadn’t thought of:

1. I’d rather just stay home
2. Usually we only get along with the kids the first day
3. What will we do? It’s just boring to hang out there
4. They don’t celebrate Christmas

Now, listening to your kids is part of being a good parent.  Always doing what they want, not so much; you could end up spending an inordinate amount of time, for example, at McDonalds.  I night characterize the 4 objections I received this way:

1. stasis
2. fear
3. features aren’t appealing
4. visions don’t match

As the owner of the vision, I need to somehow deal with each of these, while keeping these particular customers happy.  (If I fail, my vision fails.)

1. I know my customers well.  This is a standard response. Staying where you are is a known experience and for many, that is preferable to the unknown even when the unknown offers big upside. This is definitely not an “early adopter” mentality.
2. Similar to 1), but in this case a there’s a specific problem with a feature that the customer can clearly articulate. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s true.  In this case it’s not.  I remind my customers of all the great times they have had in the past, they come back with examples of problems, etc.  Actually just talking the issues through, makes my customers feel better.
3. In this particular case, the features weren’t articulated well by mean.  In other words, my messaging was poor.  When I explained that we wouldn’t only be hanging out in Seattle, that we were going to the mountains and the snow, most of the objections went away. I provided a means for my customers to perform a cost-benefit analysis.
4. I honestly hadn’t considered this point and I could see that it was extremely important to my customer.  Was it possible to fix this and maintain the vision?  In the end, it was not difficult to at all.  My sister was happy to celebrate Christmas in the cabin.  While we wouldn’t have a tree, we could hang stockings and exchange a few presents.  We could even have a  White Christmas!  Problem solved.

BTW, we continued to “add features” throughout the trip that required more “customer development.”  Multiple times the adults said “we’re going to do this (go for a walk, snow shoe hike, etc.),” each time met with derision from the kids; each time resulting in a good time for all.  Children, like customers, sometimes must simply be (are looking to be) led.

This is perhaps a silly example, but I thought it illustrates several points:

• Founder owns the vision
• Communication with customers hones the vision, reveals customer pain and exposes emotional objections to features
• Companies must reject some customer requests, e.g. those run counter to the vision
• Companies must effectively message the value of the vision, features, etc.

Hope you all had a great season, I did!  : )

People, language is for communication and marketing terms, abused as they are, fall somewhere within the scope of language.  To communicate you need to learn the terms.  To practice marketing or to hire a marketer you need to grasp some basics. Please.

Marketing Help Rule 1.

(<> means “not equal to”)

Blogging <> PR <> Brand <> SEO <> Logo <> Advertising <> Tagline <> Messaging <> FaceBook <> Positioning <> Twitter <>Lead Gen <> [Enter mktg term here]

Marketing Help Rule 2.

Trust me, you don’t need all the marketing tactics listed in Rule 1.

Marketing Help Rule 3.

The right marketing tactics for you, right now depend on WHO your prospective customers are and WHAT stage your company is in.

Marketing Help Rule 4.

All Marketers have a core competency (or two).  Regardless, (almost) all Marketers will sell (almost) all marketing services.

Marketing Help Rule 5.

You need marketing to grow your business.  And more likely than not, you need or will soon need help marketing.  Admit it.

For a moment, forget everything you know or think you know or have heard about marketing.  Start with a clean slate.

Now imagine you are a new customer of a particular product or service.  You just finished buying.  You are a bit giddy:

• You’re eager to get started.
• You’re excited at the prospect of reaping serious value.
• You’re determined to at least get your money’s worth.
• You have a small fear in the back of you mind that you spent too much or made the wrong choice.
• You both want to show it off and hide it from view until you’ve proved it’s worth.

Now like a bad movie flashback, go back to this morning right before your alarm clock sounded.  Better yet, go back to the moment BEFORE you realized you had a NEED that you MIGHT eventually purchase SOMETHING from SOMEONE to RESOLVE the need.  Your experience from this moment –pre-realization –to the moment of sale is marketing.

Your maybe want to tell me it’s sales.  But no, the seller sells.  The buyer experiences marketing.  Whether you agree or not, analyze all the marketing advice you’ve received in this context.  Think about all the people telling you that you must use social media marketing.  Think about magazines, news, commercials, blogs.  Think about your logo and your clever slogan.  Think about “your brand must be consistent!”  Think about your color palette.   Did any of these things affect your path from pre-realization to purchase (as far as you know)?  No, yes, maybe?

Ruminate on this concept:

Ms. pre-realization will eventually buy from me because:

• I’m a good person
• I try hard
• My technology is the best
• I don’t oversell
• I’m ethical
• General Haig interviewed me on some TV show on a plane somewhere, sometime.  I think.
• I tweet

Marketing feels daunting because you are being shown a dozen yellow brick roads that weave off gloriously into the colorful horizon.  That and the promise that the chosen path is flowering with ROI poppies.  Walk forward in your customer’s shoes from before purchase; from pre-realization.  How do you get to you?