“launching a product is the most expensive market research you can do”

Customer and Market Validation

A discovery process to understand:

What’s valuable to the customer

Create a Go-To-Market strategy

Prove a profitable, sustainable business model as quickly as possible

When to do a Customer/Market Validation?

Preferably as soon as you have the idea and before developing a product or service

If a product or service is already launched and sales are not what you expected then NOW, before hiring a new team, re-launching or re-developing the product

What does it answer?

What problem/s we are setting out to solve?

What’s their scale and importance - is the solution a ‘must have’ or merely ‘important’?

How to find customers? What positioning resonates best? Who will buy and how will they buy? How much will they pay to solve their

problem? How can you create a scalable business?

How’s it done? Via a 5 Stage Process:

1. Review of existing planning, strategy, research and demos

2. Run Process Preparation meetings – brainstorming to extract and evaluate hypotheses, qualify opportunities based on compelling business criteria

3. Pre-screening interviews and recruiting - screening of targets and arrangement of meetings

4. Customer/market validation meetings - with potential buyers/key decision makers

5. Go-To-Market strategy – including sales roadmap

Hypotheses – create, test, validate, change, repeat… for each:

Problem Hypothesis Positioning Hypothesis Value Prop Hypothesis Differentiation Hypothesis Market Hypothesis Market Type Hypothesis

Product Hypothesis - we’re selling this product – not this product plus lots of custom features!

Pricing Hypothesis Sales/Distribution

Hypothesis Exit Hypothesis

Example Hypothesis: Market Type

Your market must be one of: new product to existing market? new product to new market? new product to existing market and trying to re-segment that market?

Each market type has different cash needs, rates of customer adoption and acceptance or requires different sales and marketing strategies

Example Hypothesis : Pricing

If customers don’t ask about price, they probably don’t understand the product concept or aren’t interested in buying it…

Pricing research has a very high ROI and very valuable payback in confidence

Goal is not just price, but to find out what drives value in the customers’ minds…

Need Help Designing or Executing a Customer & Market Validation Process?

Jeffdrust@comcast.net+1 650 208 5771Skype: jeffdrustwww.linkedin.com/in/jeffdrust

Testimonials

“We hired Jeff as an expert in the CAD market who could give us advice on our product and marketing plans. We have been extremely satisfied with his work in this regard. … His marketing recommendations have proven to be right on target.”

“Jeff helped to solidify our go-to-market strategy and align it better with our customers for long term success. His deep knowledge and structured methodology is of the highest caliber of any individual that I have worked with.”

“Jeff came highly recommended to me as a leader in market strategy and business model development. Jeff led the market validation process for our IT start-up. He is an incredibly organized, motivated and meticulous professional.”

“Jeff has been working with our company on a number of critical initiatives including helping to create and focus our market strategy, execute our market research and product validation. Jeff has been one of the most professional executives and consultants with whom I have ever dealt.”