Dive deep into Customer Discovery technique to get a little closer to PMF moment.

Today I would like to introduce some technique I read from the book “INSPIRED — How to create Tech product that customers love” by Marty Cagan. As he has tremendous experience with product teams, his book elaborate not only the theory and technique side but also pointed out the challenge when you applied it in reality.

https://svpg.com/our-books/

Let’s hear his viewpoint (related to my previous article about “How do we find PMF — product market fit?.) how de defines PMF.

“Product/market fit shows up in terms of happier customers, lower churn rates, shortened sales cycles and rapid organize growth”

Wowwww, that’s such a beautiful glory when you obtain PMF. Obviously, you (as product manager) has to empower your team and you, yourself to drive towards such ambitious goal. Put your fear aside, and let’s dive deep into “Customer Discovery Program Technique” of this book. The perfect stage to use this is after you are clear on objective when you started the project. If not, go back to my previous article — Justify the right pain to solve.

Customer Discovery Program Technique

The power of reference customers

Reference customer refers to a real customer who is willing to pay to use your product not friends or family.
It is the process of discovering and developing a set of reference customers in parallel with discovering and developing the actual product.
Identifying the happy reference customer is powerful for Salespeople to continue work on finding PMF because they might fall into situation where they try to sell to whatever and however they can. He suggested from his experience to identify at least 6 reference customers.

1. Single target market
   To get 6 reference customers in your specific market segment, it means you shall obtain 6 similar customers. In case your product aims to tackle several regions — you should obtain 6 reference customers per region too. ( 6 customer for US, 6 customers for Germany, and so on. )
   ❌ Avoid getting few customers 2 or 3 customers which are from separate market segment because it won’t be useful in such case.
2. Recruiting the prospective reference customers
   The goal is to get 6 customer for a single target market. If your company has a big customer base, you might try to identify from it. On the other hand, if the service is to penetrate to new domain — you have to find the prospect in new market. Identify the real customer who has the pain he/she want to solve and not yet happy to use any existing product in the market. Ensure that the customer is willing to spend time closely working with you e.g. testing your early prototype, providing feedback.
   ❌ Avoid getting the technologists because they might interest to test your technology without having a real desperate pain.
3. The relationship
   The relationship between prospect and your product team is able to enhance the actual data, to test your prototype (MVP), and might as well agreed to become a public reference if the product works well for them. Some team uses the approach of testing whether the prospect has actual pain by introducing pay in advance to participate in the program. The author doesn’t agree with this because it will ruin the relationship.
   ❌ Avoid of becoming their assistance to work on everything your 6 reference customers request — will become an awful product. Instead you must dive deep to identify the single solution that works well for all 6 customers.

Above is the technique from the author, and I would like to share my perspective from the actual experiences.

For my first project, I involved with IoT product for the 1s time — and at that time, this is new domain our company is trying to tackle. We do not have customer database to approach for reference customer.

At early stage, we participated in some exhibition in which the visitors were expected to be the key decision-maker in the company. We collected some data and provided to the engineer to make a quick prototype.

Now moving back to my mission to identify prospect in different region. We did some quantitative online survey beforehand with set of questions to identify whether particular region has a pain we expected them to have or not. Since we need to recruit new prospect in new region, I spent time to research how to enhance reference customer in speedy manner yet not harmful cost us up-to-ceiling-budget. I coordinate with local business partner to set a free seminar for specific theme about using IoT and Cloud technology for the workplace transformation. At that time, the topic was hit in that market, several seminar and articles provide the information about business transformation — I’m confidence this is a good topic to enhance to prospect.

The local business partner sends out the newsletter to their member database with specific profile from my end. The content I provided is a combination of an informative session about the core pillar to make workplace transformation successful + an introduction to our IoT + Cloud concept + an introduction of platform from our partner. It was conducted around 3 hours with a snack break.

From the seminar, we got 3 prospects from 30 seminar attendees.
We provide free trial program with limited duration + NDA contract.

To wrap-up, I personally agree to get at least certain no. of your happy reference customers. The challenge is how to obtain it, which is depends on your service/product. In my context, I’m dealing with B2B customer domains. Here’s what I can summarize

1. Be clear on your customer persona. For B2B, dive deeper into Who is influencer, Who is decision-maker, Who is end-user ?
2. Tackle one single market at a time. After you achieve result, start expanding to other region. Why? It saves your resource and help you concentrate a single market.
3. Online quantitative survey — Relative costly and time consuming but might be useful in case you have set of assumptions you are unclear.
4. Seminar — Free or paid is up to your strategy. Without brand exposure, Free seminar is suggested. The key is to design a clear invitation who should join to actual target to get useful leads and design a content balance with information and a tie-in to your trial campaign. Make sure to spend time talking to attendees and collect the survey.
5. FREE or PAID trial campaign? — I originally did a free campaign + NDA contract with prospects. However, I reject the author’s point of avoiding to charge the trial customer. To introduce “request pay in advance” can proof if the customer has real pain or not in very fast manner. The charing amount of cost depend on your strategy. You may mention the normal price when the product moves from beta to general selling stage and offers discount if the prospect join the trial campaign. Since they have to internally work with their Purchasing team in the company, the extra effort occurs. If the prospect doesn’t go just a small extra mile to do that, they do not have desperate pain, equally you should not waste time to chasing them.

Thank you for reading my article and if you have tried other methods, why not share about it in below comment box? :)