Three Sales Pitches That Never Really Work
Here are three sales pitches that never really work with some suggestions for how to improve them.
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Customer Development
Challenges in Analysing Market Structure and Competitive Landscape
Before you introduce a new product into an existing market you need to analyze the market structure and competitive landscape. This is a laundry list–not a prioritized list—of the set of challenges we currently wrestle with in helping clients monitor their external environment and craft strategies for new market creation and new product introduction into
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Where Do Lean Startup Methods Help Most?
Where Do Lean Startup Methods Help Most? The Lean Startup 2012 conference clarified where Lean Startup principles are especially applicable: Emerging markets, Industries that are being disrupted, Companies that have fallen behind the innovation curve. All of these situations are characterized by the need for exploration and discovery instead of continued execution of the current
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A Conversation With A Bootstrapping EdTech Startup On Customer Interviews
What follows is a sequence of E-mails with an entrepreneur bootstrapping an EdTech startup around the challenges of doing customer interviews that have been recast as a conversation, with the original content edited for length and clarity. Entrepreneur (E): I am working with a couple of friends–we all have day jobs–on an idea for helping
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Lean Startup Conference 2012 Roundup
This post curates content and commentary related to the 2012 Lean Startup Conference: videos, blog posts, slides, articles, etc.. Lean Startup Conference Main Program Mon-Dec-3-2012 Opening Remarks by Eric Ries Presenter: Eric Ries / blog / @ericries / W: Eric Ries / The Lean Startup Book: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Video: pending Articles/Blogs/Commentary Lean Startup Not Just
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Entrepreneurial Passion and the Science of Startups
Successful entrepreneurs have a passion to see their inventions adopted as innovations not admired as works of art. This is the science of startups.
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Q: Is Building The Wrong Product A Waste Of Time?
Building the “wrong product” is not a waste of time you learn about the market and technical feasibility. Right and wrong are both gray, not black or white. Customer development and technical development typically require a sequence of prototypes that are “less wrong” over time under they become good enough.
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Conversations With Prospects: Practice, Review, Share Notes, Ask for Feedback
Conversations with prospects unfold in real time: you must listen for what’s said and not said, manage your emotions, and understand the implications.
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Standing Out From The Crowd
So much marketing is “me too”, if you have read one press release or marketing material you have read them all. It is always a trick about how to reach your audience and stand out from the crowd by being different. In an age of low-cost email campaigns and social media, we are actually finding
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Don’t Practice Veterinary Marketing: Talk to Prospects
My father used to complain that a friend of his would make his doctor practice veterinary medicine. The doctor would ask him what was wrong and his friend would reply in a non-committal way. Some entrepreneurs, especially in the early market, seem to prefer veterinary marketing: running tests and making changes in their application without
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Customer Development Is Not Just For Startups
We have Fortune 500 clients who are launching new products and who want to take advantage of customer development methodologies (or have come to the conclusion that they need a framework to revisit assumptions that are not working). There are broadly two types of situations where a large company is launching a new product: It’s
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Pictures Are to Words as Conversations are to Surveys
You waste time and reputation using these methods for B2B customer discovery: surveys, landing pages, and asking for endorsement before product experience.
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Customer Interviews: Allow Yourself to Be Surprised
A few thoughts on customer interviews and why their capacity to surprise us makes them preferable to surveys and landing pages for early market exploration.
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Business Model Representations
In a blog post last October entitled “Entrepreneurship as a Science – The Business Model/Customer Development Stack” Steve Blank suggested Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur defined a business model as how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. More importantly they showed how any company’s business model could be defined in 9 boxes. It’s an
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Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews
This post on customer development interviews is one of my most popular. If you would like help preparing for customer development interviews or reviewing results from recent interviews please sign up for a no cost no obligation office hours session and I will be happy to help you rehearse or de-brief. Here are my lessons learned from taking
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Malcolm Gladwell Suggests Appreciative Inquiry Into Inner-City Schools
From a Time Magazine December 2009 interview with Malcolm Gladwell I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. They do really, really well in sports. It’s not correct to say these schools are dysfunctional; they’re highly functional in certain areas. So I’ve always wondered about
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Appreciative Inquiry Mindset Essential to Customer Discovery
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a mindset that is essential in customer discovery. It encourages you to look for what’s working in an potential customer’s organization and “work with the grain of the wood.” It enables you to build on demonstrated strengths and accomplishments in framing your solution to a critical business problem.
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Customer Development Conversations With Busy Prospects
Question from an entrepreneur in the midst of customer discovery for a new product. Q: We are preparing to launch our first product in a few months. Next week there is a conference sponsored by a professional society that represents one of our potential target markets. We have already done about a dozen customer discovery
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It’s the Picture on the Box that Sells the LEGO Set
A common complaint an entrepreneur voices when they first try to explain why a prospect should pay for their product: “It’s difficult expressing the value proposition in just a few words because there are so many different ways to use it.” Many an entrepreneur with a new product Here are some things to try to
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Selling to a Business Requires Conversations that Build Trust
I am always interested in having a conversation with a prospect. If you are hoping to infer needs from seeing them press a menu button with an icon or one or two words on it I think that’s a poor substitute for a conversation. I know that people cannot always predict what they need or
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