M3 | Your Customer
Module Three: Your Customer
Chapter Introduction
Selecting and understanding target customers represents a pivotal first step for entrepreneurs ready to embark on the startup journey. Learning directly from potential users through customer discovery unearths invaluable insights that serve as the venture’s foundation. This customer-centric process enriches innovation strategies and forges lasting bonds with those you seek to serve.
This chapter explores critical concepts and pragmatic steps to identify and profile high-potential customer segments, map their experiences to pinpoint needs, and map the customer discovery process to transform assumptions into facts. Embracing customer perspectives allows entrepreneurs to create differentiated value propositions, de-risk product development, and establish traction for sustainable growth.
Section one introduces customer segmentation to select and describe ideal target users. Section two discusses approaches to visualizing customer experiences to unearth pain points. Finally, section three provides interview and survey best practices to plan discovery initiatives revealing actual market realities. Adjusting your vision based on wisdom from future customers illuminates the path ahead more clearly.
Section 1. Defining Target Customers
Selecting the right customers to focus on as you launch your venture is a critical decision that can determine the success or failure of your enterprise. In the early stages of the venture realization process, it’s essential to identify your potential customers and ascertain if they would be willing to pay for your solution. In this process, it’s vital to recognize that customers can differ in how they experience the problem, how they purchase solutions, and how you can reach them to deliver value. These differences necessitate the consideration of categorizing and prioritizing your potential customers, leading to the identification of your initial target market.
When identifying your target market, customer segmentation plays a crucial role. It involves dividing your potential customer base into subgroups that align with your new venture’s goals for early traction and profitability. Entrepreneurs create these subgroups based on customer needs, priorities, and financial capabilities.
Defining and prioritizing customer segments often involve assumptions made by entrepreneurs. Defining these assumptions is a vital step for new ventures due to limited resources and infrastructure that initially hinder reaching multiple customer segments.
At the beginning of your venture, you likely have assumptions about who your customers are, based on personal experiences or conversations with people in your network. While you may firmly believe that many people experience the problem you aim to solve, these assumptions need validation. The customer discovery process seeks to convert these assumptions into facts. You can group early assumptions about customers can into four areas:
The customer’s experience with the opportunity you aim to solve.
The solutions customer currently use to address their issues.
Your ability to reach and engage with the customer.
The customer’s demographic profile.
Understanding these areas is crucial to identifying and prioritizing the right customer segments for your venture.
The Customer’s Experience with The Problem
Understanding the customer’s experience with the problem is crucial when launching a venture. You can validate assumptions about the severity and frequency of the problem and the customer’s eagerness for a solution through market research.
To thoroughly comprehend the customer’s experience, it is crucial to identify the specific context surrounding the problem. Context refers to the circumstances and situations in which the problem occurs. Questions such as what, when, where, and with whom are helpful in this analysis.
Begin by clarifying what the customer is doing when the problem arises. Although many products can address a particular issue across different situations, it’s essential to identify the specific use cases for your product. For instance, if you’re targeting improved lighting for Zoom calls, potential customers might seek products for home videos, podcasting, photographic portraits, etc. Understanding the various use cases is vital for effective segmentation.
Considering the timing of the customer’s problem is also essential. While the visible or easily observed aspects may be an initial focus, a deeper understanding of the customer’s journey is necessary. This understanding involves looking beyond the immediate issue and exploring what might have led to the current situation, similar to a medical diagnosis where the practitioner considers more than just the observable symptoms.
Context also encompasses where and with whom the customer experiences the problem. Does it occur at work or home, alone or with others? Identifying these factors is critical to grasping the customer’s genuine experience.
Understanding the context allows you to see how situational factors affect the customer’s experience with the problem, both functionally and emotionally. Are there elements of the context that contribute to the customer’s experience or the problem itself? Does something about the what, when, where, or whom play a role in the customer’s frustration or distress? This comprehensive insight into the customer’s experience enables a deep and empathetic understanding of the problem.
Customer’s Experience with Current Solutions
Assumptions about the current solutions to a customer problem are also essential when launching a venture. Entrepreneurs often assume that their solution is superior to existing ones or that no solutions currently exist—a belief that is usually incorrect. It is crucial to spend a significant portion of your discovery process learning how the customer now addresses the problem. What products or services do they use? How well do these solutions work? What is lacking? How can the overall experience be improved? What benefits would they expect from a better solution?
There are invariably alternative methods for customers to address significant issues. As an entrepreneur, you should enumerate all the options the customer might have available. By asking questions about existing solutions, you learn more about potential competitors. You can assess the competition level in your market based on the number of alternative solutions and the current satisfaction with those options.
When evaluating existing solutions, it’s crucial to consider both direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer products with similar functionality and attributes to your proposed solution, even if they are not identical. Indirect competitors provide alternative methods for addressing the same problem, usually with a different approach but still offering some relief.
Examining your customer’s purchasing behavior can also offer valuable insights. You can gauge their preferences by looking at products that can serve as proxies for their potential interest in your solution. For instance, if you plan to sell a high-end home exercise bike, you should investigate whether your customers buy other high-priced adjacent home equipment like top-tier treadmills or premium outdoor cycling gear.
Another essential aspect to consider is whether your solution requires customers to own another product, known as an installed base. This situation is common with software products, where customers need specific hardware to use your application.
Gathering information about the customers’ experience with the problem and solution, their accessibility, and competing products will help you assess which customers will most likely try your product and pay for its benefits. Listing your assumptions and collecting data on each customer segment allows you to prioritize and select your initial target customers. A unique customer segment consists of end-users with similar needs and pain points who are likely purchasing and using similar solutions.
Your Reach and Engagement Potential with Customers
Another critical segmentation aspect is your assumptions about customer access and ease of reach. Entrepreneurs should carefully consider how easily they can deliver their products to target customers. It’s common for entrepreneurs to overestimate the ease of reaching customers in terms of initial marketing and product distribution. It’s vital to clearly define these assumptions about customer reach and access, considering how customers will learn about your offer and the ongoing touchpoints throughout the sales process.
One crucial attribute to explore is how customers get their information when searching for solutions. This knowledge can help validate whether a customer aligns with one segment or another. In this context, you want to know where they research, who they share information with, and who they generally turn to for advice.
Understanding the channels through which customers seek information can guide your marketing efforts and help you connect with potential customers. Customers might rely on:
Online Search Engines: Some customers use search engines like Google or Bing to find product information that can solve their problems. Understanding their keywords can inform your strategies for search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).
Social Media: Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn can be sources of information for customers, especially those who rely on recommendations from their network or influencers.
Blogs and Online Forums: Blogs and online forums can be valuable resources for customers looking for in-depth information or community advice about potential solutions to their problems.
Industry Publications and Media: Customers might also get information from industry publications, news articles, or televised media coverage related to the problem they are trying to solve.
Recommendations from Friends, Family, or Colleagues: Personal recommendations can be a powerful source of information for many customers. Understanding this can help you develop strategies to encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
Professional or Industry Associations: Some customers might turn to professional associations for information on solutions to their problems, mainly if they’re operating within a particular niche or industry.
By understanding where customers get their information when searching for solutions, you can tailor your early engagement efforts to reach them through those channels. This approach increases the likelihood of successfully engaging with your target customers and, ultimately, achieving better sales outcomes.
The Customer Demographics Profile
Many early assumptions focus on identifiable characteristics of potential target customers. Listing these first can help focus your market research efforts. These assumptions include gender, age range, education and income level, lifestyle, and specific behaviors. These factors broadly fall under the umbrella of demographic segmentation. As with all assumptions, you will test them during the early customer discovery phase. Conversations with potential customers who fit the specified demographic criteria will help to validate or revise these assumptions about target customer demographics.
There are various ways to segment your customer base or market, such as:
Geographic: This involves establishing geographic boundaries for your early venture launch. Consider where you can most easily reach and engage your customers in marketing, pre-sale inquiries, product distribution, post-sale customer service, and potential future sales. If location limits any of these engagement activities, assess your geographic scope.
Demographic: This involves researching the demographics of your customer base. Common demographic categories include age, gender, ethnicity, income, mobility, education, homeownership, and employment status. Identify the most relevant demographic categories to build a preliminary picture of your typical customer.
Lifestyle: Lifestyle segmentation considers behavioral patterns in your target customers, including activities, attitudes, interests, opinions, values, and income allocation. It reflects customers’ self-image and how they believe others perceive them. It’s related to specific behaviors that are part of your customers’ overall behavioral profile.
Behavioral: Segmenting by behavior involves examining common behaviors manifested by your target customers, either in general or related to the problem your venture is addressing. For example, if you’re starting a food-related business or app, you’ll be interested in your target customer’s behaviors around selecting and going to restaurants. Quantify these behaviors when possible.
Special Characteristics: This segmentation category includes any unique product ownership or characteristics related to the customer’s problem. For instance, if your product or service supports smartphones, you might target customers who own a smartphone or use a specific operating system.
Reason for Solution/Purchase: Articulate customers’ core reason to purchase your solution. These reasons should align with your value proposition, the key benefit the customer hopes to derive from your product or service.
After conducting preliminary research on these assumptions, you can create your customer profile. A customer profile comprehensively describes your ideal customer, considering various factors like demographics, lifestyle, and behavioral attributes. It serves as a tool to help you understand your target market, develop marketing strategies, and design products or services that cater to their specific needs.
In summary, segmenting your target market involves making assumptions about customer characteristics and testing them through early customer discovery. By understanding the various aspects of customer segmentation and using this information to create a customer profile, you can more effectively target your ideal customers, design products or services that meet their needs, and develop tailored marketing strategies that resonate with them.
Defining Your Customer Profile & Persona
A customer profile gives your venture team and associated stakeholders a clear picture of your target customer segment’s common characteristics and behaviors. Typical customer profiles include demographics like age, gender, socio-economic status, income range, family size, education level, hobbies, purchasing behaviors, and lifestyle. Keeping this picture in mind, you can help make decisions aligning with your customer’s requirements and desires. These decisions include adding specific product features, new ways to engage the customer via social media, or creating new customer service programs.
Creating a customer persona from the information gathered in your customer profile is crucial in understanding your target audience and making informed decisions about your product or service. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on your gathered data. By creating a vivid, detailed persona, you bring your customer to life in an easier way for your venture team and associated stakeholders to understand and relate to.
To create a customer persona, identify your top-priority customer segment or “Beach Head.” This segment should represent the ideal customers you want to target initially and have the highest potential for success. Then, use your customer profile information to create a detailed persona for this segment. Include demographics, lifestyle, behavior, and any other relevant information. Give your persona a name, and even consider creating a visual representation to help bring it to life. Follow these steps to create a customer persona from your profile:
Gather Detailed Customer Data: Gather detailed data for your customer profile. This information typically includes demographics, lifestyle, purchasing behaviors, and other relevant characteristics to your business. You can gather this data through various means, such as customer surveys, interviews, market research, and analyzing data from existing customer interactions.
Identify Common Patterns: Analyze the data collected in your customer profile to identify common patterns and trends among your customers. Look for shared characteristics or behaviors that stand out in your customer base.
Define Your Primary Customer Segment: Select your “Beach Head” or primary customer segment, representing your ideal customers with the highest potential for success. This segment will focus on your initial efforts in reaching and engaging customers.
Create a Customer Persona: Create a detailed customer persona using the information from your customer profile and focusing on your primary customer segment. This persona should include demographics, lifestyle, behavior, and other relevant information. Give your persona a name, and consider creating a visual representation to make it more relatable. Remember, the persona should represent a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on your gathered data.
Iterate and Update: As your business model evolves and you gather more customer information, regularly update your customer personas to ensure they remain accurate and relevant. This practice helps you stay in touch with your customers’ evolving needs and preferences, allowing you to adapt and stay competitive in your market.
By creating a customer persona from your customer profile, you can better understand and relate to your target audience. This understanding can drive informed decisions and strategies, helping your venture team and associated stakeholders engage more effectively with your customers. Ultimately, this leads to better customer experiences, increased loyalty, and higher profitability for your business.
As you gather more information and insights about your customers, update your customer personas regularly to ensure they remain accurate and relevant. This practice will help you stay in touch with your customers’ evolving needs and preferences, allowing you to adapt and stay competitive in your market.
Defining customer profiles helps you to identify how you will best reach and engage your target customer. Start with your top priority customer segment, your “Beach Head.”
Selecting Your Primary “Beach Head” Customer
Selecting your primary “Beach Head” customer is a critical step in your venture’s early stages, as it helps you concentrate your efforts on a specific, targeted market segment with the highest potential for success. To prioritize and select the best “Beach Head” customer, you need to thoroughly evaluate each potential market segment based on the following criteria:
Customer Need: Determine whether the customers in this segment have a strong need or want for your product or service. Assess their dissatisfaction with current solutions and whether your offering addresses specific pain points. A compelling need can drive higher demand and faster adoption of your product.
Affordability: Evaluate the purchasing power of the customers in this segment. Can they afford to buy your product or service at a price point that allows you to generate a profit? Consider income level, disposable income, and willingness to pay for your offering.
Accessibility: Analyze how accessible the customers in this segment are in terms of marketing and distribution. Can you easily reach them through advertising channels, social media, or other marketing strategies? Can you efficiently deliver your product or service to them? An accessible customer segment is more likely to be aware of and purchase your offering.
Competitive Advantage: Assess your ability to outperform existing competitors in this segment. Can you enter this customer segment and gain early traction by offering a unique value proposition or a better solution? A strong competitive advantage can help you capture market share and establish your brand.
Segment Size: Evaluate the size of the customer segment and its growth potential. Is the segment large enough to sustain your venture and support your growth objectives? A more significant segment may offer more opportunities for revenue and expansion, but it may also come with increased competition.
By answering these questions and analyzing each criterion, you can prioritize your potential market segments and select the best opportunities for your venture. Once you’ve identified your primary “Beach Head” customer, focus your resources on effectively reaching and serving this segment. Tailor your marketing efforts, product development, and customer service to meet their needs and preferences.
Remember that establishing a solid presence in your initial “Beach Head” customer segment can serve as a springboard for future expansion into adjacent market segments. As you build credibility and a loyal customer base, you can leverage your success to explore new opportunities and grow your venture.
Section Conclusion
Selecting the right early customers is critical for new ventures, requiring thoughtful segmentation and prioritization. Customer discovery involves testing assumptions about target customers across four key areas - their problem experience, current solutions, accessibility, and demographics. Creating detailed customer profiles and personas for your “Beach Head” segment allows you to understand your ideal customers deeply. This knowledge enables aligning your business decisions with their needs and concentrating marketing efforts for the greatest traction and ROI. Choosing the optimal initial customer segment provides a solid foundation for future growth.
Section 2. Mapping Behavior and Mindset
One approach that can help you identify and articulate a customer’s problem and related context is a customer experience map, sometimes called a journey map. This post uses these two labels interchangeably. With that said, one way to differentiate between the two labels is to consider a journey map as the customer’s experience with your product solution (post-purchase). Journey maps focus on the customer’s engagement with your brand at each touchpoint, from initial awareness through purchase and post-purchase engagement. A customer experience map focuses on the customer’s thoughts and actions before accessing your solution (pre-purchase, typically pre-awareness). Experience maps look at how customers are engaging with other brands to find a solution to their problems. This information is invaluable to understanding how customers look for answers, their decision process, and current marketplace options. The focus is on the customer’s experience with the problem, emphasizing all the challenges throughout the process. Your solution has not yet entered the picture.
Mapping the customer experience is an excellent way to articulate your core assumptions about the customer’s problem, experience with current solutions, and what benefits they expect from a better solution. As you will see, it allows you to visualize the steps and actions the customer takes to solve the problem, their challenges, and their mindset throughout the process.
Supporting the Customer Discovery Process
Applying customer mapping as part of the discovery process helps you prepare and learn from interviews and surveys about the customer experience. Creating a visual map illustrates how the customer is experiencing the current problem. It allows you to think about the best way to structure the interview and ask questions to elicit the customer’s perspective on the problem and their experience. One way to think about this is to outline what you perceive as the customer’s story about experiencing the problem you hope to solve. And like all stories, there is a beginning, middle, and end. You will be better prepared to listen to the customer’s account if you have anticipated the arc of the customer’s narrative before the interview. That said, you cannot let your assumptions get in the way of listening in an unbiased manner throughout each customer interview.
Additionally, this mapping activity helps in building your customer profile. Thinking about the customer’s story and experience helps to anticipate various challenges that they may be experiencing (pain points) as they attempt to solve the specific problem and identify special reasons why the customer is looking for solutions. You most likely will discover that different customer segments follow a different story arc. Thus, their solution needs may differ. Visualizing how each customer segment approaches the problem and attempts to solve facilitates more refined customer profiles and personas.
Visualizing the Customer Experience
One of the optimal ways to create an empathetic understanding of what a person is trying to accomplish and how they are feeling along the way is to use tools that allow you to visualize the situation in context. In design thinking, visualization is a core approach to developing a deep understanding of your customer and experience. Therefore, let’s explore the use of a holistic mapping process. Taking a holistic approach allows you to consider what is going through an individual’s mind while moving through the steps of a specific job or task.
As a starting point, always begin with a simple template to help decide on the various components of the customer’s experience. Start by considering the customer experience as a story, beginning, middle, and end. As noted in an earlier post, deciding on the timeframe is essential to framing the customer’s problem. At what point do you see the story beginning? The answer to this question can be challenging. Commonly, we visualize the problem and attempt to solve it at an obvious point of occurrence. For example, if the customer has trouble getting to work in the morning on time, one might be tempted to begin learning about the customer’s morning routine. But maybe, the story starts the night before or earlier.
As you work on this basic map, you can add more components to the customer story, more details about each phase, and specifics about what they are doing and how they feel at each stage. There is no limit to the number of phases you identify; some problems can occur across several periods and contexts. I have had many entrepreneurs work on new healthcare ventures, always looking for ways to make the diagnostic and care process more seamless. In exploring the experience, the customer has moved from initial awareness of symptoms to going to the doctor and making an appointment. As you lay out each phase, you can isolate where potential challenges exist as the customer works their way through the steps. Maybe the customer tends to delay deciding to go to the doctor because of barriers to access (lack of insurance) or managing other responsibilities (challenging to take off from work). Each step in the experience may offer insight into the most significant pain points and where you can best provide value to the customer.
Another approach to visualizing the customer’s experience is as a system - there are inputs, throughputs, and outputs. You can break up these system attributes into functional and social-emotional elements. Functional elements often involve specific tasks and behaviors. Social-emotional components range from manifest emotions to cognitive models applied to the job. Later, as you listen to and observe individuals’ functional behaviors, you will identify patterns of behaviors and events. Additionally, you will define underlying structures and practices (external to the individual) that drive behavioral patterns. Expanding how we look at the problem and how individuals deal with various challenges will increase our solution choices and the long-term efficacy of selected solutions.
Combined, you can begin to visualize the functional tasks from the beginning to the end of the job in question. At the same time, you can consider what the person is thinking and feeling throughout each stage. Finally, you can collect observations and data beyond behaviors and thoughts and consider contextual elements such as external structures, policies, and practices.
An integral part of the customer’s experience is identifying and visualizing the customer’s mindset throughout the experience. One can define mindset as what the customer is thinking, saying, feeling, going for information, and looking for guidance. These elements are similar to what you can identify using an empathy map. A standard empathy map template asks you to determine the customer’s experience in quadrants, what the customer is doing & saying, hearing, seeing, and feeling. Plenty of variations exist, but it is another good way to approach the customer experience holistically.
Creating Customer Experience Journey Maps
Here are the steps for creating your first map. The first step is to select the customer segment or community you believe best represents those experiencing the problem in question and are interested in finding a solution. As mentioned earlier, focusing on a specific segment enhances your understanding of your customer profile.
With your target customer in mind, you should generate a step-by-step list of activities and behaviors manifested during the customer’s current attempts to accomplish a task or solve a problem. At this point, you should label the phases of the customer’s experience. Each phase should serve as a rational container for the customer’s activities and challenges during the overall experience.
Once you have outlined these steps, add any challenges or obstacles the customer experiences while doing the activity. These should correspond with your current assumptions about the customer’s pain points, discussed while framing the initial problem. I find identifying customer pain points at each stage of the experience valuable when designing effective customer solutions. By pinpointing the exact time and location of the pain point, you can develop targeted solutions with measurable outcomes to support the overall solution. Please note that you should also record any steps or activities going well. Your future solution designs should incorporate what the customer sees as positive elements of their experience.
Then, fine-tune the map by adding your assumptions about the customer’s thoughts and feelings throughout this experience. At this point of the map creation, you should consider all aspects of the customer’s mindset. Like an empathy map, document what the customer is feeling and what they are saying and hearing throughout each stage. Here, you can identify what channels they are using to research information about the problem and what solutions exist, and by whom.
As a final step, you should add any necessary situational conditions that you think are important to understanding the customer’s experience in “context.” For example, is there anything about the environment to note? Is the experience always in a specific type of location? Indoors? Outdoors? Maybe it happens at a particular time of year or is associated with special events. Are there any cultural areas to consider? Context is any condition or situation outside the individual that may influence their experience as an enabler or obstacle. I think it is essential to consider the goals of the customer throughout the experience. It is common to witness changes in what the customer wants to accomplish at different stages of the overall experience. Goals also vary across different customer segments. Changes in what the customer wants or needs can lead to potential innovative solutions and process improvements.
The good news is that designing a customer experience map does not have to be complicated. You don’t need any special tools, templates, or software. Many entrepreneurs I work with use graphics available in go-to presentation software. However, many options range from general visualization applications like mind mapping tools to dedicated customer experience software supporting persona development and map design.
Mapping: An Iterative Approach
One of the best things about customer mapping is that you can build on it as you continue to engage customers and associated market research. First, through customer discovery, you learn more about their current experience. Then, you can work with your team to generate potential solutions and finally help document experience with early product experiments and prototypes.
The early customer experience maps focus on articulating your assumptions about what the customer is doing and thinking. This first version focuses on recent experiences without referencing your proposed solution. It is in this version that you establish the customer’s basic story. How do you see the story playing out? Where does it begin? What happens in the middle? How does it end? At each story component, you identify what the customer is doing, thinking, feeling, obstacles faced; solutions tried, and any contextual factors.
The second iteration of customer experience maps comes after you have interviewed several customers, documented their experiences with the problem, and attempted to solve it. Here you are looking for patterns across stories and refining the customer experience map across all components. I label this version as the “validated” version, where customer discovery corroborates the customer’s experience. Now you possess a map representing the problem from the customer’s perspective, not your early assumptions.
The third version of your map aids in generating innovative solutions, focusing on minimizing customer pain points and creating desired value across the customer experience. You will begin prioritizing desired benefits and identifying design criteria for an effective solution. The “innovative” version is where you identify and integrate your solution designs into the customer’s future experience.
A Word of Caution: Cognitive Priming Effect
Cognitive priming refers to the phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus influences the processing or perception of a subsequent event or situation. For example, a particular word, image, or concept can affect how we perceive, interpret, or respond to a stimulus that follows.
We always warn founders that there can be a priming effect when they create a customer journey map before interviewing the customer. Developing the journey map involves reviewing and analyzing the customer’s interactions, experiences, and emotions while attempting to achieve their goal. Each step of the customer’s journey can activate a founder’s cognitive processes, biases, and expectations about the customer’s experience.
When interviewing the customer, these preliminary thoughts and interpretations can unconsciously influence the questioning, interpretation of responses, and overall understanding of the customer journey. This cognitive priming effect can shape the direction of the interview, potentially biasing the founder’s perception or leading to confirmation bias, where you focus on information that confirms your preconceived ideas.
To mitigate the priming effect, it’s essential to approach customer interviews with an open mind, actively listen, and avoid leading or biased questions. By being aware of your cognitive biases and priming effects, you can strive for a more neutral and unbiased interview, allowing the customer’s perspective to emerge more authentically.
Keeping all this in mind, I still maintain that there are advantages to using a customer journey map before interviewing the customer. While cognitive priming can introduce biases, it can also provide some benefits. Mapping the customer journey provides a visual framework that keeps the interview focused and structured. This focus ensures you will cover all the relevant stages and touch points throughout the customer journey. Secondly, the mapping beforehand helps to create reference points throughout the interview, supporting targeted prompts that can lead to more in-depth discussions and valuable insights.
Developing the customer journey map enhances your familiarity with the customer’s journey, pain points, and emotional states at different stages. This background knowledge can help you interpret and contextualize the customer’s responses during the interview. Finally, pre-interview journey mapping can stimulate new ways of looking at the customer’s experience, leading to additional hypotheses. These hypotheses can guide questioning and exploration, allowing innovators to delve deeper into specific areas of interest.
From Customer (Problem) Experience to (Post Purchase) Journey Maps
Once your customer uses your solution, you can switch to customer journey mapping. You now focus on the customer’s experience with your solution, interactions across all product sales channels, and overall brand engagement. The mapping approach focuses on the customer’s experience with the problem and competitive solutions to your specific offer and business model. As opposed to the customer experience with the problem, the phases in this map typically correspond with your venture’s sales funnel - awareness, consideration, decision, and later advocacy. You can learn a lot by mapping the customer’s experience with your venture and its offerings. This activity helps to increase brand interaction, engagement, and loyalty. In addition, journey mapping provides insights into customer satisfaction, reasons for attrition, and opportunities for new products and innovations.
Section Conclusion
Design thinking tools, such as customer experience mapping, are essential for entrepreneurs to understand and solve customer problems effectively. Customer experience mapping visualizes the customer’s journey and mindset, helping entrepreneurs articulate assumptions, identify pain points, and refine customer profiles. It supports preparation for customer interviews, targeted solution development, and consideration of contextual factors. The mapping process evolves iteratively, leading to validated maps and innovative solutions. After the solution is adopted, entrepreneurs can transition to customer journey mapping to improve brand engagement and identify opportunities for innovation.
Section 3. Planning Customer Discovery Activities
Customer discovery represents a pivotal moment in the startup journey where assumptions meet reality. By directly engaging target customers through interviews and surveys, founders gain invaluable insights that validate or refute beliefs about market needs. This process of testing assumptions reduces risk and drives the development of genuinely customer-centric solutions.
Structured customer engagement enables observation of actual behaviors and preferences rather than speculation. Founders discover how customers experience problems and interface with existing solutions in their native context. The entrepreneurial learning journey transitions from theoretical to experiential.
As customer discovery progresses through opportunity and solution phases, flexibility remains imperative to pivot strategies based on evidence. While certain assumptions may prove accurate, others must adjust to align with market feedback. An iterative, responsive approach positions the venture for optimal product-market fit.
Customer Engagement: Interviews and Surveys
Customer interviews and surveys are powerful tools within the customer discovery process. Through interviews, you can engage in meaningful conversations, gather qualitative insights, and uncover deeper customer needs and desires. On the other hand, surveys enable you to collect quantitative data and broader perspectives from a larger sample size. By combining both methods and their findings, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers and drive more effective innovation strategies.
Customer discovery is an iterative process; ongoing engagement with your customers is vital to staying ahead of their evolving needs. By incorporating customer interviews and surveys into your innovation toolbox, you can build stronger customer relationships, develop customer-centric solutions, and position your organization for long-term success in today’s competitive marketplace.
Preparing for Early Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are a powerful tool in the customer discovery process. They provide an opportunity to have in-depth conversations with your target customers, allowing you to delve deeper into their needs, pain points, and preferences. You can ask open-ended questions, listen actively, and gather qualitative insights beyond surface-level understanding during interviews. By conducting customer interviews, you can uncover valuable insights that may not emerge through other research methods.
When conducting interviews, selecting a diverse range of customers representing different segments, demographics, and usage patterns is essential. This segmentation ensures a comprehensive understanding of your target market. Additionally, it’s crucial to create a comfortable and non-judgmental environment, encouraging customers to share their honest opinions and experiences. Analyzing and synthesizing the interview information will help you identify patterns, common themes, and critical insights that shape your innovation strategy.
Once you have defined your target customer and market, you can prepare to engage them directly. This early customer engagement is a critical step in the venture realization process. The primary objective of these early interviews is to find evidence that your assumptions about your target customer are correct.
The primary objective is to validate your preliminary assumptions about the target customer profile and the problem they hope to solve. You should structure the interview to explore essential elements of the customer’s profile and experience related to the opportunity, solution, desired benefits and outcomes, and purchasing process.
While you can conduct the customer interview semi-informally, preparation should be structured and well-organized. I recommend that you start by listing your core assumptions about the target customer and their experience with the problem to be solved or the job to be done. Are there critical demographic characteristics that you need to validate during the interview? What do you see as the problem? How important is it that your customer finds a solution? Are there other solutions, and are those solutions missing something the customer wants or needs? How much is the customer willing to pay for the solutions?
Once you have identified your core assumptions about the customer, identify any measures or metrics to quantify the customer’s experience.? For example, can the customer estimate the problem’s pain point? If the customer spends X amount of time on a task that they feel is onerous, how much time do they spend? This response will quantify the problem. Upon further exploration, you can then explore how much time current solutions save the customer. Are customers satisfied with the time savings? If not, what degree of time savings would be considered valuable? The answer will measure the customer’s perceived severity of the problem and what gain they would expect from a new solution.
As part of these interviews, validating your assumptions about the target customer profile is essential. You must record the selected demographic information and behavioral characteristics of each interviewee. Do they fit your initial assumptions about the customer? It does not matter whether you focus on a specific customer segment; diversity can be helpful at this point. You will see how people with different demographics and characteristics perceive the problem, solution, and expected value.
The Interview Questions
Now you are ready to generate the questions you plan to ask during the customer interview. I suggest you create a short series of questions guiding the customer to describe their experience as a story. For example: Tell me about the last time you experienced said problem or job-to-be-done. As the customer describes their experience, probe for details about the problem, its timeframe, the severity of pain points, specific actions, and the customer’s emotional state throughout the experience.
Core Customer Questions
Tell me a story about the last time _____________.
What worked well about _____________?
What was the most challenging thing about _____________?
Why was it the most challenging?
How do you currently solve it?
What’s wrong with the current solution?
What would a solution have to do to help you achieve your goals?
Your questions should be mostly open-ended, allowing the customer to openly and freely drive the conversation without being led by your preconceived notions. I have listed some starting core questions to get you started. Once you have created your interview script, it is time to identify people who meet your customer profile.
After structuring your interview questions, you should conduct 2–3 test interviews as a practice run. You can see how the customer responds to the questions during these test sessions. You are soliciting the kind of information required to validate your assumptions about the problem, current solutions applied, and the desired benefits of a practical solution hoped for by the customer. For these test interviews, you can practice with people you know as long as they generally meet your target customer profile.
Focusing on Customer Actual Behavior
The main focus of the core questions is to develop a deep understanding of the customer’s current needs and behaviors. One of the first principles to remember is that you must listen carefully to how your customer is behaving now. From the start, you should be probing how customers behave as they work towards their goals. You want to identify behaviors at what many call an “uncomfortably” specific level.
There are several methods to facilitate this probing activity. For example, the Five Why method can help customers articulate more contextual and behavioral details. This approach helps to understand the customer’s experience with the problem by repeatedly asking “why” the interview progresses from the surface-level issue to the underlying cause. This interview method allows the interviewer to gain a deeper understanding of the problem and gather insights for further investigation and improvement.
The contextual inquiry method observes the customer’s interaction with a product in their natural environment. In the customer discovery stage, the focus may be on a competitor’s product that the customer currently uses. By having the customer walk you through how they use the product step by step, you learn about specific behaviors along with their motivations, preferences, and pain points. This method helps founders gain specific insights into the product’s functionality and potential areas for improvement from the customer’s perspective. This method helps the founder understand the customer’s experience in a real-world context and make informed design decisions to enable future products to address customer needs in a better and differentiated way.
Another method similar to a contextual inquiry approach is ethnographic interviews. This method adopts an anthropological approach to understanding customers’ cultural and social context. This method involves spending time with customers, observing their routines, and conducting interviews to uncover deep insights into their behavior and motivations. While this can be time-consuming, it can provide an in-depth understanding of the customer’s current behavior in dealing with a specific issue. For example, I had a student designing a product that would help customers manage their wardrobes so they would know what they currently have and what new fashion items to purchase for specific occasions. Early in the customer discovery process, the founder would spend time in the customers’ homes and observe how they organized their closets, selected outfits for specific occasions, and decided when a new item was warranted. The founder documented these observations via video for review and analysis.
Having customers keep diaries and journals of their experiences can be another approach to discovering specific behaviors and mindsets when trying to accomplish a goal. This method provides longitudinal insights into their behavior, habits, and challenges, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding. I have had some students use this approach along with text messaging prompts. Founders can design a schedule of prompts to be sent via SMS to customers throughout the diary study period. These prompts can be reminders to document specific activities, capture thoughts or experiences, or answer predefined questions about their behavior. One of my former student founders applied this approach to capture customer thoughts and behaviors associated with negative thinking and emotional responses. The learning from this approach helped her build a cognitive behavioral program and application to help diminish the number of negative thoughts a person has daily and increase mental well-being.
Pain Point Interviews focus on the obstacles that get in the way of the customer behaving in a certain way or achieving their goals. These interviews aim to identify specific pain points, the degree of severity, the context in which they occur, and customer attempts to mitigate them. These interviews lean into the customer’s challenges and usually start by asking about their biggest challenge when doing a particular task. The interview protocol focuses on a specific task and context. It can be a helpful approach in later phases of customer discovery after you have validated the importance of the opportunity.
These interviews typically start by asking customers to describe specific situations or scenarios where they faced challenges, frustrations, or encountered problems related to the area they are exploring. Encourage them to provide details about what happened, why it was problematic, and the consequences or impact it had on their work or life. You may apply the five why technique to support in-depth probing for root causes of the pain points. During these interviews, you should take thorough notes, capturing each participant’s pain points, frustrations, and obstacles. It helps to record direct quotes and specific examples to capture the essence of the customer experience. Once you have conducted several of these interviews, review and analyze the interview data to identify common themes, patterns, and recurring pain points. Group the pain points based on similarity or severity to prioritize the most significant issues. I have had students use Miro Boards to support the identification of trends and patterns across interviews.
Journey Mapping and Storyboarding is a practical approach to discovering customer behavior by creating visual narratives that depict the customer’s journey, experiences, and interactions with a specific problem or task. It helps identify pain points, emotions, motivations, and opportunities for improvement. In the context of early customer discovery, these methods focus on the customer’s thoughts and actions before accessing your solution (pre-purchase, typically pre-awareness). In these narratives, one envisions how customers are engaging with other brands to find a solution to their problems. This information is invaluable to understanding how the customer looks for answers, their decision process, and what options currently exist in the marketplace. The focus is on the customer’s experience with the problem, emphasizing all the challenges throughout the process. A startup’s early product ideas have not yet entered the picture.
How Many Interviews?
Most startups ask how many interviews are enough. Quite frankly, no one answer covers all circumstances. If you are conducting these interviews with potential customers and don’t have a current product, consider at least twenty-five consumer-based interviews. I break these 25 interviews into three phases: Pilot Interviews, the First Ten, and the Final 20-25. You will be looking for specific information and trends in each phase.
As noted above, the objectives of the first 2-3 interviews are to pilot and refine your interview protocol. At this juncture, you can re-assess the questions and sequencing and see if the customer is discussing their experience in context and articulating how they currently behave in the situation.
Once you feel that you are deriving the correct information from these early engagements, I suggest you go for the subsequent ten customer interviews. With ten interviews, you can begin to see patterns in these discussions. By this point, you are looking for potential validation of your core assumptions about the customer profile, experience context, goals, key behaviors, and desired outcomes. After ten interviews, founders should have a good sense of whether they are addressing a severe customer issue, that significant obstacles are getting in the way of desired goals, and whether there is significant dissatisfaction with current marketplace solutions. You are looking to understand how much effort customers exert to find products that support accomplishing their goals. Your target customers must actively engage in these activities, measured by effort, time, resources, and money spent.
After these ten interviews, you should start to feel confident that you are speaking with the right customers and that a few customers are genuinely excited that you are looking into this opportunity. If there is no or limited excitement after ten interviews, you are speaking to the wrong target customer or have yet to identify a severe need area. In either case, it is time to reconsider your current assumptions.
However, if you see positive responses and some trends emerging after ten interviews, you can go after the next series of interviews to conduct 20-25 sessions in total. Now that you have some patterns emerging, you can probe deeper into this discussion, challenging patterns to support validation. Like the scientific method, you want to focus on disproving your assumptions. It is important to note that you should not be bringing these patterns up in the interview. You should be waiting for customers to bring up the issues independently. If they don’t bring it up, you can consider addressing it by presenting the opposite perspective to see how they respond. You need to be careful not to bias the customer by leading them to address patterns that did not come up naturally.
By the time innovators conduct 20-25 interviews, there should be a clear pattern of responses as to the essential questions of customer profile, context, need, key behaviors, obstacles, and desired outcomes. Hopefully, if one reevaluates each interviewee cohort, you will have enough validation to consider shifting to product design and testing.
Finding Initial Interviewees
Once you have refined the interview questions based on these practice sessions, identify the first ten customers you plan to speak with regarding the problem. These interviewees should be individuals that meet your general customer profile as you currently understand it but who are not previously known to you. You are now looking for actual early customers who are actively looking to solve the problem and have an urgent reason to speak to someone about their experience unbiasedly. This selection criterion is the only way to maximize your learning about the customer’s needs and solution requirements.
As a starting point, list ten potential customers and their contact information. Once you have your questions organized, schedule a time to speak with each customer. Of course, you will need to talk to many more customers during the discovery process, but these first ten people can give you a sense of whether you are on to something. It also helps to evaluate whether you ask the right questions to the right customers.
It is essential to acknowledge that business-to-business customers (B2B) can often be challenging to pin down and schedule time on their calendars. You might be lucky to find even a small number of business owners or executives willing to meet with you in some cases. Your experience with engaging B2B customers can be an authentic learning experience for you. The responsiveness or lack thereof are data points and early feedback for you to assess. It would be best if you did not jump to immediate conclusions. You will seek evidence of the business’s interest in solving the problem. Is there a strong interest and immediate need to solve the problem, or is it low on a priority list? Are you targeting the right business segment, or are you reaching the right decision-maker? Again, don’t jump to conclusions; take early responses as data to interpret as you solicit more and more information.
After you have had the opportunity to interview the first ten target customers, you can take stock of what you are learning about the customer’s needs and behaviors. Summarize what you have discovered, assess where you stand by validating your core assumptions, and decide how to proceed with your business model’s continued development. Conduct a debrief after every ten interviews until you see common customer response patterns. As mentioned above, by 25 interviews, you should have a good sense of whether you have the right target customer and need area to support future product design activities.
There are many other elements of the interview process to consider. These considerations include finding your target customers to interview, articulating the purpose of the interview, and the most effective ways to conclude the interview.
Finding your target customers can be challenging. For this reason, I ask aspiring entrepreneurs to assess early in the process the degree of access they have to potential customers. Even in the best of circumstances, finding willing interviewees is difficult. There are many ways to reach your target customer, starting with your network of friends, family, and professional acquaintances. Linkedin and other social media platforms can be applicable at the start. You want to capitalize on your network to help introduce you to people you don’t know— - their friends, families, and connections. Depending on the problem you are trying to solve, there are always specific online communities or associations to recruit target customers. Students successfully place targeted ads on social media platforms to solicit interested parties.
You learn a lot from understanding where you can best reach your interviewees. Keeping track of where your potential customers heard about the interview provides early insight into the more effective ways to access them in the future. This information will help you create an early market entry strategy and inform you of the most effective promotional channels.
Introductions and Closings
The following vital element to consider is the optimal way to introduce the purpose of the interview. You will want to consider how to introduce yourself and the reasons for wanting an interview without biasing how the target customer will respond to the questions. I always worry that if customers know you are an entrepreneur, they will want to know what your product is, how it works, and so on. For this reason, I suggest you introduce yourself as someone researching a specific problem and looking to understand it better from people with the proper experience. This introduction allows you to stay focused on the problem and not lead to questions about your specific solution.
There are a few essential questions that you can ask as you conclude your interview session. Start with a recap that communicates to your potential customer that you have listened carefully. It also allows you to check if there is anything else on the customer’s mind. Try this: - “In summary, it sounds like this part of the job/task is quite challenging to deal with, while some other aspects cause less concern. Is there anything else I should have asked about this task/job/challenge?”
The second ending question ascertains if they are interested in following your progress and learning more about your work. Something like: - “Thank you for sharing your experience with me. Would you be interested in staying in touch? I want to share the findings from the research and any next steps planned in the future with you.” Of course, this questioning line helps to validate exactly how interested they are in the problem and your work on it.
A final question can focus on expanding your respondent pool by checking if they are willing to refer you to someone they know who is experiencing the problem. You may ask: Try - “Do you know anyone also interested in solving this problem? Would you mind providing an introduction?”
Customer Discovery Surveys
Customer surveys are another valuable tool for gathering quantitative data and feedback during customer discovery. Surveys allow you to reach a larger sample size and efficiently collect data on a wide range of topics. By designing well-crafted surveys, you can obtain specific information about customer preferences, satisfaction levels, and behaviors.
It’s essential to define clear objectives and craft concise, relevant, and unbiased questions. You can administer surveys through various channels, including email, online platforms, or on-site. Offering incentives such as discounts or exclusive content can encourage participation and increase response rates. Once the survey data is collected, it can be analyzed to identify trends, correlations, and insights that inform your innovation strategy.
While interviewing customers is a preferred method for early customer discovery, there are many reasons to consider using a survey or questionnaire to solicit customer information about the problem, current solutions, and desired benefits. One of the significant benefits of online surveys is the ability to reach large numbers of customers in a relatively short time frame. However, designing surveys properly to solicit valid information from customers is challenging. The survey must ask questions that are context-specific and unambiguous. To create a survey that meets these criteria, you need to have interviewed several customers to learn the context and the language they use to discuss their experience or use a third party with substantial experience with the specific customer base.
We suggest you follow the question protocol like the more semi-structured, open-ended customer discovery interview. Start with a general introduction that explains who you are (student, researcher), what problem you are investigating (purpose), and how long the survey should take (5-10 minutes recommended). I usually thank them for completing the survey upfront and in advance.
After the survey introduction, you should design your questions to solicit information about the customer’s experience with the problem, specific challenges, application of current solutions, and desired outcomes. As noted, you can follow a similar script as you use in an interview, except the questions solicit quantifiable responses. See the table below for some examples.
Survey Questions
The first set of survey questions should help validate that the respondent is part of your target market. Questions may include specific demographic data such as age, gender, level of education, location, etc. You only need to focus on particular customer profile elements that are essential to how you have segmented your customer base. One noteworthy mention is that sometimes you may need to ask sensitive questions. Questions about income or specific health conditions fall in this category. In this situation, you may want to place these questions toward the end of the survey. Additionally, provide a “prefer not to say” response.
After collecting the required demographic data, move to the questions designed to validate your assumptions about the customer problem, the challenges they experience, which solutions they have tried recently, and what behavioral or emotional outcome they would like to achieve from an efficacious solution. Designing these questions can be pretty challenging. You are taking your initial assumptions and creating a way for the customer to respond in a quantifiable form. For example, in a customer discovery interview, you have the customer tell you about the last time they experienced a specific situation or job to be done. You ask this very open-ended so you would solicit a direct, unbiased response from your customer. When you structure a survey question, you now list specific actions, behaviors, and emotions occurring during the problem to be solved or the job- to be done. In effect, you anticipate specific optional responses and hope to learn about those selected the most within your customer sample. Selecting the appropriate response options is vital and is ascertained during customer interviews. After several interviews, you will better understand the actions, behaviors, or emotions the customer experiences. Importantly, you will have learned how the customer describes these experiences in their language. This way, the survey questions will be more understandable to the customer respondent, making the survey responses more reliable and valid.
After you have asked a few questions about the customers’ experience with the problem and the specific challenges reported, you can focus on what solutions they have used to solve the problem. Learning what solutions they have tried is an invaluable source of information. You will identify alternative solutions in the market, whether direct competitive solutions (similar to your product idea) or indirect options that solve the problem differently. Again, through interviews and market research, you should have a sense of the solutions out in the market and list them to see which ones the customer uses the most. Of course, as in many of these questions, you can add the “Other” option to learn about other solutions that are not on your radar. Through questions about optional solutions, you can learn who your competitors are, where these solutions are underperforming, and, often, how much the customer is paying for these solutions. Thus, you now understand how proactively they have pursued solutions and how much they have historically paid for such outcomes.
The last series of questions can provide beneficial information for your venture. The first question is to ask the customer how they heard about the survey.? Here, you should provide all the channels you used to solicit customer respondents. Your listing should be particular and align with the methods you used. For example, if you use certain social media, list them individually— - Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. Information about which channels resulted in strong response rates is critically important data. This information provides early historical data about your sales funnel. What are some of the best ways to create awareness and potentially quality leads for your venture? By responding, you know you reached them, and the customer was interested enough to take action and - complete your survey.
The other question that complements the channel question is asking whether the customer is interested in staying in touch with you. By checking “Yes” or leaving their email, they communicate their interest in solving the problem. Validating their interest in conjunction with how they learned of the survey now gives you some early conversion data by promotional channel. For most new ventures, this is the first time you discover this kind of information, which will play an essential role in customer acquisition strategies later in the venture realization process.
A final question that can help expand your list of potential respondents is to ask the customer to recommend someone dealing with the same problem. While this question may not always be appropriate in specific problem areas, it can help expand your respondents’ pool. Even if you ask them to send the survey link to people in their network, this can significantly enhance your response rates. Sometimes, you can provide incentives for such referrals, such as educational content on the problem in the form of a free PDF.
Testing the Survey
As with customer discovery interviews, it helps conduct an initial trial run survey with several target customers— - friends or colleagues are good sources to check for question clarity and language use. You want to ensure the questions are transparent, answerable, and unbiased. Question clarity comes from statements that use precise language using vocabulary that your customers will understand. Avoid asking multiple questions - you won’t know which question that respondent answered. The order of questions and answers can influence how the customer thinks about the topic and the subsequent response. There are several approaches to avoid biasing questions, including randomizing the response choices for particular queries. This issue arises when your assumptions are part of a list of response options. For example, if you anticipate that your target customers already use specific competitor products, you will want to embed these product choices randomly among other optional responses.
Getting your survey in the best shape possible is vital before expanding your sample size. Don’t be afraid to send out several iterations to small numbers of target customers and reflect on the responses until you are sure the survey meets all the critical criteria, as noted above. Once you are ready, you will look for a large number of respondents.
Unlike interviews, surveys allow for reaching a much broader customer base, and sample size matters. The larger the sample of respondents, the more you can trust the information gathered. Again, there will be differences in the number of respondents you acquire in Business-to-Customer (B2C) versus Business-to-Business (B2B). While there are many ways to think about the target number, I suggest that your goal should be at least ten times more respondents than interviews. If you initially interviewed 50 consumers (B2C), consider 500 survey respondents a worthy goal.
Documenting Customer Survey Findings
Considering how you plan to analyze the data before designing the survey is good. Think about the analysis method and how to show the findings to others best. Deciding how to visualize optimally and display survey data will help you design the questions best to produce said informational outcomes.
In general, you look to demonstrate results and validate assumptions in three areas. Were you able to validate that the interviewees were part of the targeted customer segment – the beachhead? Here you can consider if any changes are necessary to your initial segmentation and other segments worth exploring. Additionally, you should evaluate how the various channels reach your segment. Keep the ones that bring many validated customer segment respondents and test new access channels as needed.
The second finding area to document is how your assumptions about the customers’ experience with the problem and its severity align with what you learn from survey responses. What have you learned about the customers’ experience with the problem you hope to solve, what challenges stand out, and how anxious they are to solve the problem?
Finally, you want to see if your target customers actively search for solutions and which ones they have experienced. You will learn how these solutions work and what they are missing, which you must determine before you start designing your solution. Most importantly, you will better understand the customer’s needs in an effective solution and the most desired outcomes.
Combining Interviews and Surveys for Holistic Insights
While customer interviews provide qualitative insights and surveys offer quantitative data, combining both methods can provide a more holistic understanding of your customers. The qualitative data from interviews help you explore the “why” behind customers’ behaviors and preferences, while surveys provide a broader perspective and statistical significance.
By triangulating data from interviews and surveys, you can validate findings, identify patterns, and gain a comprehensive view of your target market. This combination of qualitative and quantitative insights strengthens the credibility of your customer discovery process and allows you to make more informed decisions when shaping your innovation strategies.
Other Venture Benefits from Discovery Activities
Customer discovery is not just about gathering information; it’s also about testing and validating assumptions. As innovators, we often have preconceived notions about what customers want or how they behave. However, these assumptions can be flawed or incomplete. Through customer discovery, you can challenge these assumptions, gather evidence, and refine your understanding of customer needs and behaviors.
Collecting Early Sales Funnel Data. One significant upside of collecting data throughout the customer discovery process is gaining early insight into sales. Documenting every aspect of the discovery process, from initial contact to engagement, provides early data on how much time you spend moving the customer from awareness to a specified call to action. At this point, calls to action may include referring you to other potential customers, interest in future updates, and willingness to participate in future product testing.
Creating Customer-Centric Solutions. Once you have gathered insights and validated assumptions, developing customer-centric solutions is next. By involving your customers in the innovation process, you can co-create products and services that meet their needs. This collaborative approach increases the chances of success and creates a sense of ownership and loyalty among your customers.
Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Success. Customer discovery acts as a risk mitigation strategy for innovation. By investing time and effort upfront to understand your customers, you can avoid costly mistakes and minimize the risk of developing products or services that fail to gain traction in the market. By building your innovation strategy on a solid foundation of customer insights, you increase the likelihood of success and reduce the chances of wasted resources.
Evolving with Customer Feedback. Customer discovery is not a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Customer needs and preferences evolve, and your innovation strategy should evolve with them. By continuously seeking customer feedback and iterating on your products and services, you can stay ahead of the competition and understand your target market deeply.
Identifying the Target B2B Customer
When targeting enterprise customers, developing an intimate understanding of potential industry sectors, company sizes, and existing customer bases that align with your solution is vital. This process allows you to refine the definition of your priority B2B “beachhead” segment for initial focus. Furthermore, you need to realistically assess whether your targeted customers’ business needs genuinely match your offering’s value proposition. Moreover, you should evaluate if your startup’s financial runway and organizational bandwidth can accommodate lengthy B2B procurement cycles and complex decision workflows. Finally, soberly determine the degree of genuine access to key contacts and stakeholders within your targeted accounts to enable fruitful discovery discussions, pilot testing initiatives, and early sales meetings.
Target B2B Beach Head Rationale
Does your target business have a compelling reason to buy your product or service? Is the need urgent?
Are the primary business needs of the customer aligned with your solution?
Do the firms’ sales cycles and approval processes work for your venture financially?
Do you have enough contacts | access for customer discovery, MVP testing, and early market entry?
Differences from B2C Engagement
Several factors differentiate business-to-business customer relationships from business-to-consumer ones:
End-users of your products within an enterprise may either be internal staff members or external customers patronizing your client’s offerings. Hence, you need to segment user groups and tailor engagement strategies accordingly.
B2B decision cycles typically involve multiple influential stakeholders across various business units and hierarchies. Due to stringent organizational policies, purchase journeys also endure much longer before culminating in sales. Therefore, you must identify critical contacts within diverse organizational roles and nurture enduring relationships across an expanded timeframe marked by persistence.
You must instill confidence amongst commercial clients that your early-stage startup can reliably deliver sophisticated solutions at enterprise scale with consistency despite inherent constraints in dimensions like financial resources, infrastructure, and workforce capabilities.
Defining Organizational Stakeholders
B2B customer discovery requires you to profile various organizational stakeholders, mapping their spheres of influence regarding procurement decisions. End-users consist of personnel experiencing particular problems that your offering aims to resolve. Study end-user demographics, behavior patterns, and frustrations to identify “early adopter” profiles within targeted accounts. Decision-makers control expenditure sign-offs and evaluate purchase trade-offs. Understand their selection criteria, buying committees, and vendor expectations. Influencers are senior executives who advocate for innovative solutions but aren’t direct users themselves. Cultivate such internal champions to lobby decision-makers. Also, determine whether targeting C-suite sponsorship first versus gaining user community traction works better.
Soliciting Discovery Interviews
After identifying key stakeholders, prepare structured outreach cadences aligned with your sales funnel methodology to initiate discovery discussions. Maintain meticulous engagement records regarding outreach channel efficacy, contact timeline lags, and meeting outcomes to uncover enterprise sales cycle patterns, allowing resource allocation optimization. Scheduling appointments with scarce C-suite executives and IT decision-makers requires tenacious efforts and patience. Craft personalized value propositions addressing their strategic priorities when seeking limited availability in their calendars.
Conducting B2B Interviews
Follow a semi-structured discussion protocol during stakeholder interviews while allowing organic dialogue digressions. Explore organizational and departmental contexts first before quantifying user problems. To build an internal business case, capture pain point dimensions like frequency, costs, and workflow impact. Then, analyze current workaround solutions and unsatisfied needs. Finally, document complex decision-making workflows, procurement approval policies, and associated cycle durations that delay B2B deals. Identify other influence matrix contacts across business units to socialize solutions for securing enterprise-wide buy-in.
There are some differences in the types of questions you will ask in a B2B context. I have listed some starting questions for each area to get you started. See list below.
Company Profile: Any firm characteristics/demographics that you want to validate? Main Customers? Product Categories?
Business Objectives: Short & long-term goals? Customer Outcomes? Product Positioning?
Decision Maker/Unit Role: Position? Roles and responsibilities? Who they report to and how many employees report to them?
Opportunity: Tell me a story about the last time you had to do X job?
Pain Points: What was the most challenging thing about…..? Why was it the most challenging? Frequency? Intensity? Time Commitment? Impact on individual or firm performance? How wide spread is the problem across the firm?
Current Solutions: How did you currently solve it? What do you like about the current solution? What’s wrong with the current solution? How much are you currently spending on solutions?
Product Benefits: What would a solution have to do in order to be considered a success? What metrics are used to measure and monitor solution performance? Who else in the company will benefit from a better solution?
Purchase Decisions: What is the firm’s process for purchase approval? What is the typical length for approval?
Building Lasting B2B Relationships
Kickstarting fruitful B2B relationships begins with discovery, but sustaining them long-term is equally crucial for startups seeking references and renewals. Nurture executive relationships through regular communication highlighting the latest product enhancements and customer success use cases. Offer pilot testing programs across user groups to garner grassroots internal traction. Provide extensive post-purchase onboarding, training, and support to assure user adoption across organizations. Proactively request referrals within clients’ industry ecosystems to amplify word-of-mouth advocacy. Continuously incorporate ongoing user feedback into next-generation product roadmaps to maintain competitive advantage.
The Critical Role of Customer Relationship Management
Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy from the early stages of venture development is pivotal for startups seeking to embed a customer-centric culture. An effective CRM system allows founders to capture meaningful customer data across the startup journey, driving growth through superior customer experiences.
Key benefits include:
Adopting a Customer-Centric Mindset: A CRM platform enables startups to align all activities around understanding and engaging customers. It facilitates collecting data on customer needs throughout opportunity discovery and solution development.
Tracking Customer Engagement: CRM tools allow startups to monitor target customer profiles, discovery and testing participation, sales funnel progression. Founders can measure marketing effectiveness and optimize strategies.
Customization for Startup Needs: DIY CRM systems built using spreadsheets, notes and task management apps provide flexibility to tailor systems to a venture’s customer model, product offering and growth objectives.
Enhanced Personalization Through AI: Integrating AI in CRM unlocks predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs, automated workflows to streamline engagement and tailored experiences to boost satisfaction.
Adopting a CRM strategy that evolves with a startup allows founders to continuously improve customer targeting, ensure product-market fit and sustain growth trajectories. By fostering intimate customer relationships, startups can build competitive advantage and brand loyalty organically from their genesis.
Section Conclusion
In closing, meticulously planning customer discovery yields indispensable market knowledge, forges durable customer bonds and de-risks product development. Combining interviews and surveys delivers qualitative and quantitative insights to make informed decisions with confidence. Converting assumptions into facts provides the foundation for responsive innovation.
Special considerations are necessary when engaging enterprise customers given procedural complexities. However, the return on investment is manifold in the form of expanded deal sizes and enduring business relationships. Likewise, implementing CRM early centralizes the customer perspective across the startup to enable superior targeting and experiences.
With vision validated by evidence, the path forward reveals itself more lucidly. Customer discovery grants the sight to navigate uncertainty and chart a course to calmer startup waters. The destination remains the same, but the journey is now guided by those who will sail alongside.
Chapter Summary
Customer discovery represents a pivotal learning journey where assumptions finally meet reality. By directly engaging individuals and organizations you hope to serve through interviews and surveys, founders gain the insights to innovate successfully. Learning customer context, frustrations, and desired outcomes should drive priorities when conceiving solutions.
This chapter outlined critical concepts and steps to identify high-potential customer segments, map their experiences to pinpoint needs, and conduct discovery initiatives revealing market realities. Key takeaways include:
Carefully segmenting customers allows startups to concentrate limited resources on user groups, offering optimal traction potential
Visualizing customer experiences highlights pain points and contextual factors guiding innovation priorities
Interviews and surveys combine qualitative and quantitative learnings to make informed decisions
Special considerations required for complex B2B customer organizational stakeholders
Implementing CRM earl centralizes the customer perspective across the startup
With enhanced customer clarity, founders can create differentiated offerings and execute strategies resonating in the market for sustainable venture growth. Ultimately, the path forward is illuminated by synthesizing insights from the individuals you aim to serve. Their collective wisdom guides the startup journey.
Module 3 Posts
Defining Target Customers
The First Steps to Traction: Selecting Your Initial Beachhead Customers
The Behavioral Edge: Revolutionizing Market Research for Deeper Customer Insights
Unlocking Customer Outcomes: The Key to Startup Success
Mapping Behavior & Mindset
The Assumption Inventory: The Step That Makes Interviews Work
From Assumptions to Evidence: Are Your Interview Questions Doing the Right Job?
Journey into the Customer's Mind: Using Experience Maps for Behavioral Insight
Empathy in Action: Leveraging Behavioral Mapping for Strategic Innovation
Planning Discovery Activities
Unleashing Value through Customer Discovery: A Comprehensive Guide for Startups
Mastering Behavioral Interviews: Unlocking Deep Customer Insights for Innovation
Essential Steps for B2B Customer Discovery: Building Sustainable Business Relations