I mentioned in “3 Equations 3 Unknowns: Customers, Features, and Message” that we spend a lot of time on the early customer stage. It requires very different sales style than you’ll see later on. It’s a conversational sales style. It’s much more about understanding the problem.
You’re trying to solve three equations, three unknowns:
- Are you talking to the right people?
- Do you have the right features?
- Do those features translate into benefits that are going to be useful to them?
The customer discovery interview process can be tough to master. You are trying to determine if the customer has a problem that they will pay you to solve with your technology: do you have the right features and do those features translate into useful benefits.
But we actually see team often go wrong with the first question: are you talking to the right people. And this error is much harder to recover from. You can do a poor job interviewing the right prospect and get some feedback that allows you to iterate. But a great job interviewing the wrong prospect will tell you very little. Improving targeting, or at least validating you can identify a prospect, has a big impact.
When someone is describing their offering at the a Bootstrappers Breakfast we will often take them through the “Three Question Test” as a group exercise. We will say,
“OK, we have assembled a brain trust for you this morning, you have 12 people around the table who would like to help you. Please give us three questions that have yes, no, or number answers and tell us the combination that would indicate that you could offer the person they are talking to clear value.”
It’s harder than it looks. Most folks start with something like “Do you want to save money on your car insurance.” This question is worthless. Any question that you can append “, you moron” to the end of is not a good question because it does not disqualify anyone (I suppose if you didn’t own a car you would not want to save money on your car insurance). The next iteration tend to start out much too broadly, ignoring geography, industry, customer firm size (whether measure in headcount, revenue, or some other transaction count), title(s) of buyer, and pain points that are actually symptoms that a potential customer is experiencing.
On this last point you don’t go to your doctor and say “I think I have diabetes” you say “my vision is sometimes blurry and I am getting really thirsty and I feel tired all the time.” Business prospects don’t want “a better website” they want “more leads from their website” or “fewer calls to the hotline–because the website allows customers to solve their own issues.”