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Justin Wilcox

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We all know, "everyone" isn't a customer segment. But what do you we do when we've got a bunch of potential customer segments?

It's an issue we all face at one point or another, in fact, as we previously noted, Bounce has a pile of potential customers:

For Real Estate agents, sales people, event planners, founders, general contractors, etc...
We could offer appointment reminders plus Salesforce integration!

For florists, caterers, utility installers/repairers, plumbers, electricians, etc...
We could provide on-time metrics for each employee!

For long distance commuters, van pools, people who commute over a bridge, etc...
We could make an alarm that lets you sleep in or wakes you up early based on how bad traffic is!

For single people who are dating, busy parents, the "chronically late"....
We could gamify punctuality so they're late less often!

For fusiness travelers, people who have just moved to an area.
We could offer additional information about sporting events, concerts, etc. that could be causing worse than normal traffic congestion.

If we target all of these customers, not only will it take forever to build this product, it'll be a complete mess. So which group of customers are our ideal targets?

We could interview 20 of each group, but I think there's a more efficient way.

Gut Check Prioritization

Let's just gut check prioritize the segments we know about:

1. First, add each customer group as a column in Excel

2. Assign each group a value of 1-3 (1 = low, 3 = high) for the following criteria:

1. Market Size - how "many" of this type of customer exist

2. Pay for value - how much we think they'll pay for this value

3. Accessibility - how easy is it to find, contact and sell customers in this segment

3. Multiply the scores together and sort them from highest score to lowest

4. Start testing hypotheses with the highest scoring segment, and work your way down until you've got something people are dying to pay you for

Why I love this process

1. It's fast. Takes < 10 minutes.

2. It's okay that we don't know the real values, we're going to test our guesses anyway. This is just a way to prioritize our customers so we don't get stuck in Lean Startup Paralysis, or start building a product that does everything for everyone.

3. We don't need to interview everybody. If our first couple rounds of testing reveal a lot of interest from our top "gut check" customer segments, but in reality "VP of Sales" were the ones most willing to pay for a product, I hypothesize they'll make themselves known once the product is launched. No need to stress out testing all of our potential revenue sources - find one that meets our minimum success criteria and go with it.

4. I was wrong. Before I did this process I had thought initially thought "VPs of Sales", the "Chronically Late" and "Regular Commuters" would all be ideal customer segments. This quick process hinted otherwise.

What's Next?

This is Part 1 of our series of on Interviewing Customers:

1. Which Customers Should you Interview (The SPA Treatment)

2. How to Find Customers to Interview

3. Getting Customer Interviews with Cold Emails

4. How I Interview Customers

5. You've Interviewed Customers. Now what?

Join the experiment - follow along via Email or RSS for updates on our next post: Help Investors Believe you - show them Customer Quotes.

Customer Development Made Easy...

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How to Pick your Customer Segment - Customer Development Labs

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Updated] January 3, 2017We all know, "everyone" isn't a customer segment. But what do you we do when we've got a bunch of potential customer segments? It's an issue we all face at one point or another, in fact, as we previously noted, Bounce has a pile of potential customers: For Real Estate agents, sales people, ...

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How to Find the Customers Who Need Your Product

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Aspiring founders who think they've developed an amazing offering often believe that their products will sell themselves. While there are occasional instances o

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The Harvard Business School professor on how to predict future customer behavior.

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Guy Kawasaki: The Top 10 Mistakes of Entrepreneurs

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The UC Berkeley Startup Competition (Bplan) proudly welcomed Guy Kawasaki to the Haas School of Business. Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple and co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures, explained the top ten mistakes that entrepreneurs make. His talk covered all stages of a startup from inception to exit.

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Now that you understand why segmentation is important it's time to explore the options to begin your segmentation strategy. At the core, segmentation is about understanding your consumer. This video reviews geographic, psychographic, demographic, and behavioral segmentation.

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Wij zijn SAMR. Marktvinders. Marktvinden betekent anders kijken, anders doen. Wij geven factbased inzichten, richting, én zetten organisaties in beweging.

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Waarom doen Nederlanders wat ze doen? Waarom leest de een liever een boek in het park, terwijl de ander liever een feestje geeft? SmartAgent, onderdeel van MarketResponse, geeft antwoord met het BSR-model. New Penguins maakte deze video in opdracht van MarketResponse.

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The Glocalities model explained - Motivaction International

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In this video Martijn Lampert explains the Glocalities model. For the Glocalities project, Motivaction surveyed more than 48,000 respondents in 20 countries ...

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The Lean Approach: Customer Acquisition and Archetypes

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Once you think you've achieved product/market fit, you need to acquire customers, creating demand through marketing. Steve Blank argues the importance of creating a customer archetype to help you figure out where to find them. This video covers the acquisition process, and helps you understand concepts such as the lifetime value of a customer.

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What is a buyer persona and how do you use it in inbound relationshipmarketing?

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Building an Audience Before You Launch | Dan Martell

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Don't believe the hype "If you build it they will come." Trust me, they won't. What I want to offer instead is a framework for building your own audience before you launch. Watch the video and ready the summary below! This is my freestyle, without notes or prompter.

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Zoek en verzamel recepten, opvoedtips, modeinspiratie en andere ideeën om te proberen.

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05 - Justin Wilcox Hack 1 - Who do you interview

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Buyer Personas zijn vooral bedoeld om de interne organisatie te inspireren tot relevante content en communicatie. Kopers krijgen een eigen gezicht en komen tot leven. Wanneer je bijvoorbeeld content ontwikkelt of een lead nurturing flow gaat opzetten zie je dat je veel effectiever bent wanneer je de Buyer Persona als leidraad neemt.

Let op: Een Buyer Persona is GEEN representatie van een doelgroep of je ideale klant maar een afspiegeling van overeenkomstig aankoopgedrag

De persona moet zo echt mogelijk tot leven worden gebracht. Een tekening maken werkt dus niet. Voorgebakken persona's werken ook niet, onderzoek daarom welke overeenkomsten kopers hebben in relatie tot jouw propositie. Zo heeft elk bedrijf eigen unieke personas, hieronder een aantal voorbeelden van bedrijven die je voorgegaan zijn.

Een buyer persona is het fundament en tegelijkertijd je gids binnen Inbound Marketing Automation. Hij is de ijkpersoon voor relevante communicatie waarmee je een boodschap nauwkeurig afstemt op je doelgroep. Ook is hij maatgevend bij het nemen van betere beslissingen over hoe je je geld investeert, je content promoot en welke kanalen je inzet.

10 Buyer Persona voorbeelden

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Voorbeeld Stan & Stacy Buyer Persona worksheet

Download hier onze Buyer Persona worksheet (PDF)

Download hier een voorbeeld van een buyer persona analyze worksheet (PDF)

Onze Buyer Persona Training

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10 Inspirerende Buyer Persona voorbeelden | Stan & Stacy

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Buyer Personas zijn vooral bedoeld om de interne organisatie te inspireren tot relevante content en communicatie. Kopers krijgen een eigen gezicht en komen tot leven. Wanneer je bijvoorbeeld content ontwikkelt of een lead nurturing flow gaat opzetten zie je dat je veel effectiever bent wanneer je de Buyer Persona als leidraad neemt.

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The Science of How Customers Buy Anything

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The Science of How Customers Buy Anything

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A basic tenet of running lean is validating a product or feature ideally without having to build it first. This makes complete sense when you look at every product or feature as it's own customer factory.

The first battle isn't fought on the ground but in the mind of the customer.
It isn't fought with your built out solution but instead with an offer.

This is true not just at the earliest stages of defining your minimum viable product but at every stage of the product development cycle.

And here's the key insight:

If you can't get people inside your customer factory,
it doesn't matter what's inside.

The way you get them inside is with an offer.

What is an Offer

An offer is essentially a stand-in for your solution that validates sufficient customer pull for that solution.

The offer is basically made up of 3 elements:

Your unique value propositionn which gets the customer's attention

Your demo which shows them how you get them from point A (current reality) to point B (desired reality)

Your price or derivative currency of exchange which locks in commitment

Assembling a Compelling Offer

Before you can create a compelling offer, you have to gain a deep understanding of your customers and their problems.

You have to understand your customers better than they even understand themselves.

In my book, Running Lean, I detailed several customer interviewing (Problem Interviews) and observation techniques for doing this.

Since the book though, I've taken the work further in my workshops and bootcamps to make it more practicable - incorporating the customer factory work, customer journey maps, and the jobs-to-be-done framework.

Here's an example of one of the deliverables from the early problem/solution fit stage:

It's a marked up customer journey map that details your customer's current reality workflow. We can then extract several layers of insights and inject our solution into this diagram that feed directly into making a more compelling offer.

I'm not going to walkthrough the detailed analysis steps today but I will walkthrough the resulting diagram that captures the job of your offer.

The job of the offer is acquiring customers i.e. turning unaware visitors into interested prospects.

The 3 elements I shared above are what go into assembling an offer but you additionally need to understand how customers buy in order to deliver your offer.

The Motivational Forces That Drive Customers to Buy

This diagram is best built up as a story.
So here we go...

Scene 1: The Push of the Trigger

Here you have a customer who is merrily going along his way until he has some kind of a triggering event.

This triggering event pushes the customer to seek some desired better outcome or make some change towards progress.

The bottom of the hill is his current reality and the top is the desired future reality he wants to achieve.

This triggering event could be something explicit like having a new baby or it could be something more subtle like maybe having 2 of your friends purchase a new car in the last month.

These subtle triggering events can sometimes be hard to find, but if you look, they are almost always there.

A new baby is a significant life-changing event that pushes people to seek out all sorts of new desired outcomes or products. The more subtle car example trigger might not actively push a person to purchase a new car but it may all of sudden make him more receptive to car advertisements or promotions.

For this reason, some triggers are more *immediately* actionable than others, but knowing the trigger(s) can help uncover both active and passive leads.

Scene 2: The Pull of Your Offer

Understanding the key trigger and desired outcome establishes the situational context you need to best deliver your offer and the success criteria you need to communicate in your offer.

If you get these right and place your offer in the right context, it pulls customers towards your solution versus other alternatives. This is where your carefully crafted UVP, demo, and pricing come into play.

If you have a big enough audience and/or brand, it is often possible to make your offer the triggering event.

Think of an Apple product launch.
A less extreme example is an educational webinar that upsells a product.

Scene 3: Overcoming Inertia and Friction

But only communicating the positive attributes of your product is not enough. You also have to address two negative forces that hold the customer back.

The first one is friction caused by the anxiety or uncertainty of embracing something new.

Here, the customer visualizes taking this journey towards your solution which triggers them into contingency planning mode. These are usually mental roadblocks that keep people from taking a chance on a new solution: "What if I pick the wrong solution?"

Some typical remedies to overcome this friction are building in risk reversals into your offer. 30 day trials, no credit card required, money-back guarantees, social proof, are all examples of these.

The other negative force is caused by inertia which keeps people from trying something new.

You can think of this as the switching cost of moving from the current solution to your solution. These may be caused by actual switching costs like annual contracts or more cognitive switching costs ingrained in current behavior or habits.

A key insight here is realizing that even when delivering a potentially new disruptive solution, you don't get to recreate the customer's workflow from scratch.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he didn't tell us 10 new things we could do with the iPad, but rather showed us 10 old things we could do with the iPad - only much better.

So the right approach here isn't redrawing the workflow or ignoring this inertia, but making the transition to your product as seamless as possible.

Note: You can see the solution injection (blue box) in the customer journey map above with an appreciation for the customer's existing workflow.

I will also add that not all friction and inertia is bad. I often use some friction and inertia as a qualifying criteria for identifying my best early adopters.

Your early adopters should have above average push and pull to overcome some of these negative forces.

But make sure you focus on the right force:

Here is the completed diagram with some additional annotation.

This diagram is what I use in my work with entrepreneurs. After all the interviews, observations, and analysis, this is the macro level view that gets us talking about how best to craft and deliver a compelling offer.

Remember this is a journey that happens inside your customer's mind which is why I show thought bubbles in the pictures above. The end result isn't always a sale but commitment that gets your closer to turning that unaware visitor into a happy customer.

I'd like to acknowledge 2 sources of inspiration in the creation of this diagram:

The Forces Diagram by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek from the Jobs-to-be-done framework

Marketing Experiments' Conversion Sequence Formula:
C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) - 2a ©

Additional Resources

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The Science of How Customers Buy Anything - Love the Problem

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A basic tenet of running lean is validating a product or feature ideally without having to build it first. This makes complete sense when you look at every product or feature as it's own customer factory. The first battle isn't fought on the ground but in the mind of the customer.It isn't fought with your built out solution but instead with an offer.

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Lean Customer Development -  Cindy Alvarez

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Lean Customer Development -  Cindy Alvarez

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bol.com | Lean Customer Development (ebook) epub zonder kopieerbeveiliging (drm) , Cindy Alvarez ...

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Lean Customer Development (e-book). How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research-before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or w...

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bol.com | Running Lean, Ash Maurya | 9781449305178 | Boeken

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Running Lean (paperback). Are you an entrepreneur about to create a new web application? If you want to maximize your chances of building something customers want, this book demonstrates ways to apply and test techniques for customer development, Lean Startup, and bootstrapping. Learn how to iden...