Comments (5)

By brantcooper, September 3, 2009 2:11 pm

A technical CEO learning marketing is the equivalent of a sales/marketing CEO learning development engineering.

Not.

I am not a developer.  If push comes to shove, I can code in PHP, or develop shell scripts, and truth be told, I did take a couple of ECE courses in college; courses which inexorably told me I was not going to be a developer.

My path to becoming a marketer was unusual, I think, which has had both its advantages and disadvantages.   I like to think I’m a “technical marketer,” rather than what I call a “Madison Ave” marketer; not to dis the later, since they have their role to play in the grand scheme of marketing.  By technical marketer, I don’t mean one who only markets technical products, or who does only “product marketing” in the industry vernacular, but rather a marketer who uses processes and actionable metrics to achieve near term business objectives that lead to realizing company vision.

IMO, development is harder than marketing.  Continue reading 'The Truth About Evil Marketers'»

Comments (3)

By brantcooper, August 11, 2009 9:28 pm

Note: Originally published at SANDIOS.

Everyone has heard of the “elevator pitch” and all entrepreneurs know they need one. Right? I’m talking about the ability to tell your business story in the time it takes the elevator to get the floor where your audience will egress. While everyone knows they need one, the confidence imbued in entrepreneurs — necessary to be an entrepreneur — often results in the overconfident belief that the pitch will magically flow when the time comes.

While I’m sure this sometimes works, the strategy is a mistake. Continue reading 'Elevator Pitch'»

Comments (4)

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'»

Comments (2)

By brantcooper, May 5, 2009 2:36 pm

I’ve been working in technology for a pretty long time, having weaved my way along an illuminating path through development, IT, project management, product management, product marketing, marketing and executive leadership.

The two key principles that tie the threads of my career together are customer development and project management. (One could probably look at all of life this way, too.)

Two epochal moments happened in my career at one company, Tumbleweed (now part of Axway), that helped me consciously acknowledge these two principles.

• I learned from CFO Joe Consul that what I had been doing for years was actually called project management.  (Yes, some of us are slower than others.)  I was able to structure and formalize what I was doing, which allowed me to become more efficient, teach others, scale, etc.

• I learned from marketing that although I was an IT Manager, my views on how to sell to IT Managers (our target market), was not necessary.

(I should mention a third moment, because it was a pivotal for my learning.  I learned from CEO Jeff Smith that passion is a key (though not sufficient) ingredient to success.  Jeff was out to change the world and he in infected us with his enthusiasm.)

Tumbleweed was an interesting ride; it reached the highs and suffered the lows that all businesses that last 10+ years endure.  A lot of mistakes were made, and a lot of lessons learned.   There were many success stories, too, and, unsurprisingly, lessons learned there, too.  I saw evidence of certain elements of Geoffrey Moore’s  Chasm, as well as in retrospect, a lack of customer development.

Not to fault anyone, but the late 90s saw a lot of customer defumblement.

Steve Blank’s presentation of Customer Development is persuasive.  Eric Ries’ Lean Startup, combining customer development and agile development principles is even elegant.

The simplicity of necessity masks the complexity of execution.

Whether internal or external, formally defined or not, no matter what you are doing, you have a customer.  Whether explicitly defined or not, you also have at least one objective associated with your customer, e.g., make them happy, accept their money, increase their market share. To reach objectives, you must execute on a carefully-crafted plan; a carefully-crafted plan that you must defenestrate the moment you conclude it doesn’t work.  Hopefully your plan includes post-defenestration steps.

Steve Blank @ startup2startup joked that, to put it mildly, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, is a difficult read.   But customer development isn’t hard because Blank’s book is difficult to read.  Customer development is hard because the answers to the questions that will test your assumptions are difficult to come by.   As any project manager who has ever had to “gather requirements” knows, customers don’t know what they don’t know.

The customer is not always right, but they do have the last word.

It’s your job to empower and persuade customers to act in a way that achieves your objectives for them.  But how do you know how to get them to act? You can guess. You can hard sell. You can ask. You can lie.

If you go about empowering and persuading the wrong way, you will lose your customer. You will lose your customer because of some combination of:

• You never actually located your customer.
• Your objectives for the customer were not clear.
• Your tactics for achieving the objectives did not match the  customer’s behavior.
• Your process for “listening” to the customer was wrong or incomplete.
• You failed to execute.

A disciplined approach for web-based products allows for faster learning, but for “offline” products, customer development is a particularly meticulous and  time-consuming process.

Here are some customer development hurdles entrepreneurs and executives need to overcome:

• A dislike of “cold-calling” potential customers;
• The propensity for selling, not listening;
• Habitual requirements gathering, instead of learning the pains;
• Over dependence on surveys;
• Reliance on focus groups, not interviews;
• Belief that past experience guarantees future;
• Basing conclusions on personal narratives.

I’m sure there are more; feel free to share in comments.