Growth Steps 1 & 2

STEP 1: Product Understanding / STEP 2: Customer Understanding

Following on from my first summary post on the Five Steps to Sales Growth below are key questions, examples and thoughts to help you tackle Step 1 and Step 2. Ideally you will want your sales, marketing and product teams working through these issues together.

STEP 1: Service / Product Understanding

• What it does (today) - It’s important to understand what it does / creates / delivers in its most basic form. For a tangible product this will be a simple feature list, for a service this may be a clear statement about deliverables the customer will receive.
• Immediate and obvious benefits to customers – This is a one or two sentence statement in customer language about the problem solved and forms the beginnings of your value proposition statement. You will want to ensure messages about these benefits and what it does are consistently used in your sales team’s conversations with customers.
• Production / scale barriers – What are the prerequisites to offering your product services to customers. Are there constraints such as legislation, geography, maximum production capacity, language, market segment, etc?
• Manufacture, build, delivery and support costs – Build an understanding of your true and full costs from the beginning as it is much easier to develop processes and systems to capture this data early rather than once you are selling. This cost information will be key base data for future business analysis that you will be called on to do by multiple stakeholders.

Note: These points assume you already have customers using your product/service. If not and you are still defining what you will offer you should swap Step 1 and Step 2 around.

STEP 2: Customer Need Understanding

• Do customers know they have a need – Is your solution to the customer’s problem so obvious that they will buy without being educated or do you need to “train the market”?
• Confirm and test - Who is the actionable group of buyers within your target market and what’s in it for them? How do you compare to other products they know, what is it that sets you apart? Why are you better and what is the proof to your claim?
• Holistic view of stakeholders – Are there other stakeholders outside of your target buyers who may influence buyers, benefit from a buyers purchase, or create barriers to purchase. These could be officials that monitor legislation in a market or they could simply be the children of the people who buy your products.
• Common customer behaviours – What triggers the need to buy, how do buyers research, what is the cycle time from, need recognised to purchase made. What are the buyers' after sales relationship expectations, i.e. technical support, account management, loyalty discounts, etc.
• Common situational issues – Are there seasonal factors that you need to take into account such of end of financial year, stocking for Christmas, etc.

These are just a slice of the issues you may need to address for each step. Feel free to add comments from your own experience within your markets, products and services.
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In my next post I’ll provide more examples and thoughts to help you address the challenges of assessing your market size in Step 3: How Big is Your Market Opportunity?