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By brantcooper, June 20, 2009 8:12 pm

The toughest part about practicing customer development is getting started.  You already know that customers are not going to magically find you because you have a great product, work hard and are good looking.  Now that you’ve realized how big the world is and that using a megaphone from your roof top is a poor method of user acquisition, what’s next?

Presumably if you are committed to the principles of customer development, you are already committed to “getting out of the building.”  Before you can interview potential customers, however, you have to find potential customers to interview.  Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets.   This is painstaking work.  Just as with other portions of the customer development model, to find early adopters you make assumptions, test, and iterate.  If you are having trouble getting started, try these steps: Continue reading 'How to find early adopters'»

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By brantcooper, March 24, 2009 10:01 pm

I am sensing marked uptake on the concept of conducting serious customer research in order to jump start high tech start-ups.  It’s about time. There’s definitely buzz building around Steve Blank’s customer development methodology.  Ego dictates that whatever you’re thinking about must be what the world is thinking about and to that, I plead guilty.

But I wrote a post about an iterative, process-oriented approach to high-tech sales and marketing on 2.9.9.   Shortly thereafter, Andrew Beinbrink, CEO of the interesting San Diego start-up SportsTV, introduced me to Seal Ellis who introduced me to Steven Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which sounded an awful lot like what I had blogged about.  Whew.  Oh, and Steve’s even got a new blog.
Continue reading 'Customer Development and Start-up Models'»

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By brantcooper, February 17, 2009 9:51 pm

As with most marketing terms, the phrase “market segment” is often tossed about carelessly by entrepreneurs, technologists, and yes, even by some marketers. To my mind, however, segments are a cornerstone of market-driven business plans. Market segments are fundamental to a process-oriented view of taking technology to market and building business plans from the “bottom up.”

In 1991, 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. 

So, for example,
Continue reading 'Market Segments'»

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By brantcooper, February 12, 2009 12:09 pm

I just got off a webinar about lead gen in today’s economic environment.   I was pleased to see several process-oriented and metrics driven marketing recommendations, including:

• need to be revenue focused, rather than # of leads focused;
• marketing taking greater responsibility for pipeline management;
• measuring, testing, refining every step of way through pipeline;
• identified information and activity overload problem;

A few key points still missing, IMHO.

First, in today’s environment, business needs to be profits-focused, not just revenue-focused.  This is a critical distinction.   An expensive advertising campaign may add more leads to your pipeline, some of whom eventually buy.  You’ve increased revenue, but hurt the short-term bottom line.   (Arguably there may be longer-term benefits from raising “awareness” through advertising.)

Second, this may just be a language thing, but I’m guessing not.   Marketing and sales professionals continue to talk about the “sales process,” e.g., the necessity to create activities and produce collateral that “nurture” customers through the sales cycle.   Despite the fact that this webinar correctly identified information overload as a problem, the end recommendations still pushed for “getting all the information the sales team needs into their hands.”  Step back!  This is classic reactive marketing and emblematic of VP of Sales (& Marketing) driven marketing.

Key question to ask:  what is the buyer’s process.

Third, “who is the prospect” was asked at the end of the webinar, when it should have been slide 1.   Even if your company was able to handle multiple segments before the economy tanked, you need to reassess to determine what are your profitable segments now. See point 1.

Comments welcome.

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By brantcooper, February 11, 2009 7:50 pm

A CEO of a high-tech start-up recently lamented to me:

I was told I needed marketing, so I hired a PR firm and after 6 months and a lot of money, I got nothing.

Paraphrasing, a local venture capitalist admits:

Most CEOs lack marketing skills.  They need marketing help.

Yet his portfolio is dominated by companies without dedicated executive marketers.

According to the uninitiated,
PR = Marketing = Advertising = Branding = Logo + Slogan = Lots of $$ and yet, sales suck.

Both the initiated and the uninitiated think sales suck because so does the web site, and the collateral, and the webinars, and the white papers, and the demo, and there are no leads, and they’re attending the wrong trade shows, and there are neither counterpoints to the competition nor answers to buyer objections, and the product is missing this feature — no that feature — well, really, both features.

Is this really what’s wrong?

In a seminar on venture financing we put on the other night, one of the presenters rightfully stated that the amount of money the entrepreneur is asking for will be important in determining the type of capital investors willing to fund the opportunity. $3M, for example, is often considered to small for many VCs. While true, I’m not sure the entrepreneurs got the point.

Typically, they’ve already decided they want VC money. So they pick the sum of investment based on the type of money and build their plan around that.
Continue reading 'Who "Gets" Marketing?'»