I agree with April Dunford on most things, except this...
The positioning GOAT, April Dunford, taught us that if we want customer insight, we should speak with our sales team.
After all, they're communicating with customers all day, every day.
It's also cheaper and more convenient for a founder to get answers from a team member than a customer.
And, whilst I agree with April on most things…
I don't agree with her on this
Sales are often customising each interaction, and they're so close to the customer that they likely act on intuition a lot of the time. Consciously, they don't necessarily know what's resonating and why.
You may not have a sales team, or if you do and it's small. Would you really want to build your entire positioning strategy on regurgitated feedback from one or two employees?
Talk about high risk!
No, what we need to do now is interview clients.
We've got specific information we want to draw from the conversations.
Here's a list of the types of questions I like to ask during a 30 to 45 minute customer interview:
- What has changed in your industry in the last few years? [We want to know changes.]
- How do these changes impact your role, both positively and negatively? [We want to understand the stakes.]
- What were you struggling with before you discovered our product? [We want to uncover the enemy.]
- What consequences did this struggle have on your organisation or the way you worked? [We want to understand their problems].
- How did you solve this problem before? [We want to understand the status quo.]
- Can you remember the point when you decided you needed our software? [We want to understand the trigger point that encouraged them to take action.]
- What is the ONE thing you no longer have to do or use that was once painful, inefficient, or eroding results? [We want to understand what they perceive our superpower to be.]
- How would you describe your work after using our product? [We want to understand what their promised land looks like.]
- What would you say if you had to describe the concrete results you've achieved to your colleague or peer? [We want to know how to articulate the proof of results.]
You're going to conduct this interview on a recorded Zoom that you can refer back to later, and while we're conducting this interview…
We're validating your perceived product benefits
In the previous email, we hypothesised feature benefits, scored them, clustered them, then filtered for the top ranked.
During the interviews, you don't mention those benefits. You wait for the customer to mention them, and when the opportunity comes, you ask them to score the significance (related to the pain they solve) on a scale of 1 to 5.
The idea here is that we don't prompt them.
We don't want to lead them - we're after a non biased interview.
But, at the end of the call, if they missed any from your list, you quickly run through them and ask for the scores.
Ideally, you'll end up with a grid recorded from 6-10 customers, with the listed benefits and average scores that help you clearly identify a winner.
Then, we tweak and refine the hypothesised positioning ingredients we made before the interviews:
- Who is your product for? Both the buying persona and the company profile.
- What does the product do for them?
- How is it different relative to alternative options?
But I feel you may have a question…
What if there isn't a clear winning benefit?
You often discover these subtle, nuanced differences between customers during the interviews.
For example, they may have similar job titles, but one customer recognised they had an onboarding problem (that your product solves) when they signed up, whilst the other didn't.
Those are two different personas that likely value two different benefits.
You map the benefit to the persona.
What we're doing here is segmenting
And the better we 'nail' who the product benefits most, the lower our customer acquisition cost, the faster our growth rate.
But remember the underlying message from previous emails?
Unless you're a large and established business, you likely don't have the resources to effectively target multiple personas.
So right now, we niche. We pick one.
Progressively, as your business expands and you get close to a significant market share for that niche, you move to the next and create multiple service pages.
But not right now.
We're targeting one niche (or persona) at a time, and to maximise growth, we need to optimise for the right sequential order of niches.
So, take into consideration:
- Who has the greatest pain
- Who's most inclined to pay to solve that pain
- Which type of persona is your happiest client
- Which market do you suspect has the greatest immediate revenue growth potential?
And now, make your choice.
Next, we need to figure out how to frame our product so that this ideal buyer views it as a necessity (rather than a nice to have).
Here's a quick question:
Do you find yourself relying more on sales feedback or something else when fine-tuning your messaging?
Until next time,
Oren
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