Who are your Customers?
You already know I'm not asking for a list of your customers or expecting you to name four random persons. I am asking what defines the people you hope to sell to and what they have in common that you can leverage to target them, reach them, and sell to them.
However, the answers to these are not just something you make up in your head. The answers are in looking at your product, identifying who needs it and then taking time to understand the people you have identified as your primary consumers. The process of understanding these people is what we'll be looking at today.
What is Customer Discovery?
Customer discovery is the process of identifying and defining your potential customers' needs, pain points, behavioural consumption, access to market and existing product options for your product development and marketing efforts. It is knowing who you want to sell to and how you can sell to them.
Ideally, customer discovery should happen before the product launch at all. Customer discovery goes as far as telling you even the right time to launch a product and how to communicate it. Why? Because your product is for people and these people are central to the success of your business.
Steps in Customer Discovery
Step 1: Define the hypothesis - state what your idea/product does for potential customers. It could be the reason you came up with the product or the use case of the product. It should be specific.
Step 2: Define your assumptions - the assumptions you made in developing your product and defining your hypothesis i.e. you assumed there is a problem; you assumed people are willing to pay for a solution to this problem; you assumed there are people that have this problem.
Step 3: Ask questions - go out and ask people about the assumptions you have made. The assumptions are to guide you in asking the relevant questions.
Step 4: Evaluate and refine - from the answers you have gotten, how relevant is your idea/product to your customers' needs? Now use the acquired data to refine your product.
In Conclusion...
The process of customer discovery also covers understanding the market need for a product. Because if you don’t see how your product eradicates at least one pain point for your customers, then that is an indication that you need to go back to your drawing board to redesign the product or come up with an entirely new product driven by market data.
