Once you have the MVP and have some users offering feedback and using the product, you need to figure out who your REAL customers are. Who are the people that could not survive without your product? You need to survey them. Use this template from forgetthefunnel - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vZNrBXRaBAVO_ddAgoRJAy3fquAZrXN_UXf703kAu04/edit
The point of surveying customers is to understand who you serve and who you DO NOT serve.
You want to interview the people who are happy because they found success using your product and signed up recently.
You want to ask customers who knew life BEFORE your product to get the desired outcome
- As Lincoln Murphy says:
- JTBD thinks about the desired outcome.
- Goal + Appropriate experience = desired outcome
- A good way to think about this is:
- Use When (Situation), I want to (motivation), So I can (expected outcome)
- "When" refers to the conditions that cause a customer to hire your product, "I want to" refers to the action your customer wants to take, while "So I can" describes the outcome your customer wants.
Once you ask these questions, then take it one step further and follow Alex Hormozi's process:
- Find your biggest spenders: Sort the replies by the customers you like the most, spent the most, and stayed the longest. Focus on the top 20%. Ignore the rest.
- See what they have in common: This takes reading through all the answers and using your brain. I know. Thinking is hard. The good news is - your competitors won’t do it - easy advantage. Goal: Come up with the fewest qualifiers they all have in common. Now, list them out. Usually, there are three to five qualifiers.
- Execute: Once you have these answers you’re going to do two important things.
- a) Speak your new avatar. Be upfront about your customer requirements. Get all advertising to speak directly to them. You will repel the bad customers and attract the good ones. Stop selling anyone who does not meet your ideal customer requirements. Seriously, stop it. Then, increase effort on the channels these people come through
- b) Re-engineer The Sales Process. Look at what caused these better customers to buy.
- Reverse-engineer the buying process your best customers went through. Then, make it happen on purpose.
- Example:
- Demographics: Right leaning/conservative, Married, 25-45, Male, Gym Owner, US-based
- Business Requirements: Signed Lease, 1+ Employees minimum, $10,000+ Per Month
- Revenue Minimum when starting, Min 30 Existing Clients Aspirations: $1M+ gym, not work so much, open more locations
- Buying Reasons: Not enough leads, “bad market”, bad pricing, can’t find good employees
- Step 4a: New Redefined Avatar: We surveyed our customers to see what the top 20 percent had in common. In other words, we got to see what our most successful customers looked like. Actions: We focused on the audiences that had the highest concentration of these types of gym owners. We spelled out our requirements in our ads and pages. We talked only about the specific problems and aspirations of our best customers, rather than all customers.
- Findings from step 1-3 about how they bought: After looking at the data, we found that 78% of our top customers had consumed AT LEAST TWO pieces of long form content before purchasing from us. This means that if we got on the phone with someone who had not done that, our chances of selling them were lower.
- Step 4b: Reverse-engineer buying process. Actions: My team then recreated this “ideal” buying experience. From this point onwards, we injected two long-form high-value content pieces to each lead as a part of their buyer journey. And, we increased our total output of content. On top of that, we created a list of our “all time greatest hits” of content to arm the sales team. They then hand-select two to three pieces they think could help the prospect. By doing that, they forced them to go through the same buying process that caused our best customers to buy. Note: They have not disguised sales pitches, they were genuinely value-in-advance content. (Like this, hopefully).
- More readings here: https://www.acquisition.com/hubfs/The_Lost_Chapter-Your_First_Avatar.pdf
Once you really know who your customers are go back and refine the marketing strategy and focus on the customers who match the top 20% of your paying customers.
Then Double down.
From the questions, you will learn what your first value should look like, which of that first product activation experiences, and what that would look like from the customer's perspective...
Then based on that answers, you'll know what parts of the product do you need to push right up to the front of that experience so they can get to it quickly right after they sign up.
You want them to experience the ah-ha! Moment (https://userguiding.com/blog/what-is-aha-moment-how-to-find-it/) as quickly as possible so that the pain is alleviated and they know your solution will continue to alleviate that pain point.
Recap:
- Step one, understand what your customers are going through, figure out the most important customer and their biggest problem, then map out the journey that they go through (using a survey questionnaire), the struggle they go through before they discover your product, the steps they go through to evaluate, decide to use your product. And then once they use your product, get them to continue using your product more and more.
You should survey customers often, possibly every 90 days. We used a simple Typeform that looked like this → https://form.typeform.com/to/E0pdTS4A