Don’t assume everyone is a potential customer: it diffuses your efforts across many prospects who don’t see the need or aren’t willing to pay.
Don’t Assume Everyone is a Potential Customer
Entrepreneurs often assume everyone is a potential customer; they pursue too many opportunities instead of focusing on those with the strongest need.
One thought experiment many entrepreneurs have found helpful is to imagine they have 100 prospects lined up outside their door.
I ask them to come up three to six questions that have a yes, no, or number answer,
that would enable them to sort these prospects by who is in the most pain and therefore most likely to pay for the product.
For B2B markets, the best questions are factual, not opinion-based, and probe the prospect’s current operating reality:
- Role and responsibilities
- Specific tasks or decisions they face regularly
- Business outcomes that are currently at risk
The key question is not whether a prospect has a problem, but whether the pain, cost, or risk is severe enough that they will pay to solve it.
“Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”
Thomas Edison
Some Implications
Another way to use the three-to-six-question filter is to consider how much you would pay to have a conversation with someone who meets your criteria. In this case, the answers normally have to be gleaned from publicly available information or from a referral or recommendation. This is, in fact, a real challenge you will face as you scale: investing effort and ultimately money to reach likely prospects.
If these are questions you plan to ask prospects to determine if you can help them, it’s important to consider if this is a question they are willing to answer and answer truthfully. Some important questions will only be answered, or answered truthfully, after a certain amount of trust has been established that you are committed to helping them if you can, and not wasting their time if you cannot.
Even a product that at first seems like it would be general-purpose may benefit from a focus on a narrow set of needs and the features to support them. For example, a butcher, a scientist, and a cook may all be able to use a scale to measure the weight of a material, but the level of accuracy, the need for independent verification and visibility of result, and the amount of material the scale needs to support may vary widely between the three use cases.
Use the “Three Minute Rule” to Clarify Needs
I like Anthony Tjan’s “Three Minute Rule”
- What happens 3 minutes before they run the report?
- What do they do 3 minutes after reading–and understanding–the report?
Use this to learn the customer’s context–the larger workflow they are likely operating within–identify adjacent opportunities, and understand how the customer may value them.
Related Blog Posts
- Ten Mistakes Early Stage Bootstrappers Often Make
- Early Customer Conversations: Use Appreciative Inquiry, Amplify Positive Deviance
- I have written about the “Three Question Test” in more detail in “The Three Question Test at the Bootstrappers Breakfast.” We often use it to help someone still wrestling with who to serve or where to focus their offering.
Image Credit: “People Waiting in Line” copyright SKMurphy, Inc.