Customers Discovered

Note:  This blog post has sat in "draft" for the last year...but the message is as clear today as ever...customer discover is inevitable on the road the success and optional on the road to failure.  Being programatic about it is always the prefered answer!


If your a sales and marketing professional and still believe the end of beta is followed by launch, I want to wish you the very best of luck! For luck is exactly what you will need if you have not yet done a customer discovery.

As I wrap up my fourth customer discover I can officially declare myself a convert. No, you won't find me at the alter of Mr Blank but my copys of 4 Steps to the Epiphany can be found floating through much of my engagement network.

None of the customer discovers have been text book - in one, the engineering team was simple too far removed to be well integrated into the process. This brought great frustration to many. In another large company, the concept of customer discover was so far outside their culture, that we simple agreed that we needed to learn what worked via customer enagement rather than spend lots of time on a "marketing positioning" exercise. This lead the company to quickly add a sales focused subject matter expert to the team - a huge accelerator to product adoption. Two others were smaller start-up scenarios, one that developed a formal hypothesis and is moving very quickly in a large and dynamic market (watch this space for more on these guys!!!), another that simple grock'ed the concept of "learn before you launch" as a financial discipline - they did, have suffered through a hopeless out-of-date web site for alomost 6 months while focusing 100% in finding their customer and will relaunch shortly with a clear and proven story.

All of these had 3 common elements:

1) Embrace your Ignorance: My key learning from Jack Welsh during my tenure at GE was "Face reality as it is, not as you wish is was" Customer discover requires the simple but very difficult acknowledgement that "we simple don't know". Without this leap from entrepreneurial bravado to confident learning...well, I hope you get lucky!

2) State your hypothesis: some kind of hypothesis, formally stated is a great starting point. My experience across all 4 is the more you state about your hypothsis, the more you will learn. If you don't have a clear pricing hypothesis, you won't learn about pricing very fast. If you don't have a clear go to market hypothesis, you'll be in the dark on G2M at launch time. This isn't all bad - in some businesses, there are strong priorities about what you need to learn in order to get started. However, its has become very clear for me that the more depth you put into your hypothesis, the more you learn.

3) Engage Customers: This remains the critical art. Lean more towards a full blown sales campaign than asking for "positioning feedback". You want to observe the partient, not simple ask them how they are feeling.