Hunting
This week I’ve been working for a client doing some customer discovery. The stuff I usually bark at other people to do: knocking on doors, lurking on social media, pouncing on anyone that looks like they fit the profile. And it’s gruelling.
Customers are pretty pesky let’s face it. They’re selfish. Only doing what they want, when they want, with whom they want. They’re hardly ever just waiting for us to get in touch and tell them about our great idea.
Of course when we had that yellow sunflower acting as a halo above our heads, the doors flew open – whether we were buying or selling, we were ushered in like sultans.
I know many of you struggle with finding customers. To be smug (temporarily), I actually haven’t struggled. Because I have mostly given away my product for free this year and people like free stuff. Especially bootstrappers. But it’s coming I know – and I’m feeling the looming pressure.
And you need impeccable timing. Because nine times out of ten you won’t be on their mind, but 99 other problems will be.
Here’s the dream scenario I am trying to help founders create:
Invest time up front in understanding your customer, their struggle and what progress looks like for them.
Engage your customers in co-creating solutions (via feedback, validation and involvement).
Enrol them as buyers, advocates, ambassadors so they find more people to buy from you.
I say dream scenario rather than dream because I believe it can happen. But it all hangs on 1, investing time up front. And that’s often where the problem lies. Because trying to understand your customer takes a lot of time, a lot of dead-ends and a lot of scratching heads. I hope Familiarize can make this more straightforward and simpler, but it will always be an investment in time.
Preach over.
Monday was a dream, two immediate responses, providing validation of my hypotheses, sharing email address, happy to be contacted by phone. And then tumbleweed. Despite almost a hundred emails, LinkedIn messages and contact us forms to people I know could be a potential customer.
But for some reason not today. Or maybe never. I don’t know yet.
This evening however was a breakthrough. A zoom call with a really lovely potential customer went so well she offered to tell people in her private Facebook group about the idea and get their feedback. Absolute gold! Entering your customers’ private world through an introduction by one of its members. Later on another chap offered to post about me in the “exclusive online community”, which I didn’t realise exists (I have only been able to register to join the riff raff online community – where no-one has responded to my posts).
And I guess that’s my overwhelming learning when hunting for customers.
Then it can go quite fast.
At the beginning, the objectives are pure and simple:
Get someone to talk to you. Time is the currency and it’s very precious.
Through this exchange (you also need to provide some value), you need to get contact details – email is best – confirmation that you can stay in touch.
And if you can, get them to recommend who you should talk to next – and ask them to make the intro.
So that’s Stage 1 of the hunt complete. There might be dozens of stages before you get to a purchase decision. Sales is not for the faint-hearted. But this is the surest fire route I know to find customers when your goal is to validate your business.
Here are some tips to help you accelerate through this ‘hunting-the-customer’ phase and help you co-opt potential co-creators, who become buyers, who become advocates:
Customers hide in strange places but after a while you realise there are patterns. They can’t help but promote, gloat and moan about what they’ve bought, so they often post on review sites. They love to be the expert within a community – those Facebook groups are brilliant here. And finally, they look for (pretty low bar) entertainment when they’re bored – think conferences for B2B, queues for B2C.
Don’t expect everything all at once – but think about engagement as a funnel, where you start broad, open and easy for your customers, and as you narrow down get deeper and expect a bit more. Start with a short survey to filter out the people that aren’t interested, then follow up with an email, a request for a phone call etc.
Add value to your potential customer – the biggest turn off is a Taker, so look for ways to give first; share some information, do something, incentivise them. Follow the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
When you finally get someone to talk to you, you can feel so grateful you let them yabber on. And you might need to in order to build rapport, but for goodness sake use the precious time wisely. Have some thoughtful, challenging questions prepared. Familiarize uses hypotheses about our customer so you can get binary responses that give you data and avoid the scattergun approach.
And finally, time is precious for both of you. But you owe them for sharing their experiences and feedback, so be super grateful. It never fails to amaze me how a quick follow-up thank you email can keep the conversation going. Make people like you!
So that’s it, some top tips to share what I’ve been learning over the past year – and what I’m putting into practice this week. And it seems to be paying off. Overnight I had four more responses to my survey (I suspect from the Facebook group), each with email addresses so I can follow up directly. Pure gold.
Good luck hunting y’all.
Two quick extra things:
1) If you want help with any of this, you only need to ask. Or look at www.gofamiliarize.com/tools if you can’t bear to speak to me.
2) If you, or anyone you know, uses Square as its payment processing or point of sale, please could you introduce us. I really will practise the five things above. The first thing you could do is share this ultra quick survey – it’s sub 90 secs. https://research.typeform.com/to/dCITNRfA