Goal : Discover potential customer segment that will be your early adopters and find out methods and channels that you can utilise to reach them easily.
The key to success in business is selling the right product, to the right people. Identifying who is the right people become a necessity, if you want to minimize your effort and increase your marketing's return of investment (ROI).
If identifying your customers involves the spray and pray method without a solid approach to segment them, you will be losing a lot of time, money and resources pursuing the wrong direction. The right approach is to confirm the suitable customer segment for your products or services through customer validation.
During the process of identifying customer segment, you should have had nailed down its specific characteristics to guide you in forming specific ways to reach the segment. It can be manual at first, depending on the size of your sale, if your product has a low price point, you need to find out how to reach these customers in a way that can scale in order for your business to have a healthy cash flow.
It is essential that you have the right channels and methods to reach your customers. Employing the wrong methods to the wrong channels would cause your business to fail despite having a brilliant solution at hand to solve a concrete problem.
Answers to Discover
Conducting customer validation helps you find the answers to these questions:
- Who will be your customer?
- How many customer segments that you have?
- What are the demographics and profile of those segments?
- What is the level of interest of my customers in my products or services? (Allows you to prioritise your customers according to level of interest.)
- How can you reach the segments identified? (You will select those segment that you can reach first.)
- How do they purchase the product?
- Are there other decision makers in the process? (Wife, parents, family, boss and etc.)
- What’s the core reason that drives each segment to buy your offering? (Understanding this allows you to have an idea of how you would position and market your product.)
- Where do your prospects gather for pleasure or work?
- What is the optimum pricing point for the level of interest of my customers?
Question Bank
Select from below the questions that you would want to ask to validate your hypothesis. Always craft your questions around the hypothesis.
Here are some questions for your reference :
- What do you do professionally?
- Who handles [process you’re improving] at your home/office?
- Tell me about your role in your [company]?
How much time do you spend on [process you’re improving]? - [Specific questions related to your product/customer] – for example, do you have kids?
- Where do you normally buy the product?
- Where did you buy the product last time?
- Which social media do you spend most time in?
- Why are you interested in the product?
Takeaway
The takeaways that we should be getting after doing customer validation are :
- A clear understanding of the market segments and which segment you should sell to.
- Know what is the message that will be persuasive to your customer segment.
- Know which channels that you want to use to reach your customer segment.
- Know who is the decision maker.
- Know if you need to do different price points for different customer segments.
