Customer and market discovery. To assess the market opportunity of a given technology and guide the product development it is critical to gain a good understanding of how the technology can be applied to important problems and challenges for customers. This starts with engaging potential customers and experts directly and interviewing them about opportunities for the technology and validating a competitive advantage in the context of other direct or indirect competitive technologies and products. The goal of this process is to (1) determine requirements (specifications) for particular applications, (2) estimate size of the addressable market for the product, and (3) get a reading of the price a customer would be willing to pay for the solution. We assist in setting up a customer discovery initiative, preparing the presentation deck, interview questions and script, identifying relevant target customers, and analyzing and interpreting the data. The gathered intelligence allows educated decisions on product development (which product to develop) and market focus (which markets to prioritize and what to postpone). Too often the success of a product is pure luck and not validated in advance by a rigorous customer and market analysis. This leads in turn to many products that are developed that don’t resonate with customers and are not commercially successful leading to a series of product iterations or pivots.
Market size analysis. As a backup to the strategic business plan, it is necessary to have good and market validated estimates of the total addressable market and served addressable market for products. We assist in identifying relevant information and putting together estimates based on sound assumptions.
Sales pipeline. Trusted business plans, especially financial performance, rely on a good understanding of timing and amount of sales. We assist in setting up a stage based sales pipeline system that can be used to make predictions based on a systematic and auditable methodology. While systems like Hubspot and Salesforce are used by larger companies, for starters a much simpler system based on spreadsheets can be used and transferred to a more sophisticated system later. Critical is the methodology for defining sales stages and setting up a system that can be kept up to date.
Lead generation, lead propagation and digital marketing. Contrary to common belief, digital marketing including targeted emails can be a very effective tool in getting leads and nurturing them into a Sales opportunity. Critical to this success is relevant content to be used in these email outreach campaigns, LinkedIn updates, Blog posts, etc. We assist in developing a strategy and implementing a system for consistent lead generation and nurturing.