By Stacey Weber
If you follow my blog, you’ve heard all about my beliefs in doing market research. I believe that the best research is done face-to-face with real, authentic conversations between you and your buyers and users – current and potential. These human connections allow us insight into the most important problems that our market is dealing with.
When we study the market and specifically look for problems that need to be solved, we find trends fairly quickly — but that’s a topic for another day. Today, let’s focus on discoveries you might make when studying your potential buyers – people or businesses who seem like they should need your product, but haven’t bought it yet. Here are six trends you might discover, with tips on how to resolve these impediments to profitability.
- Let’s start with the worst problem you could discover. Maybe when you go out in the market and talk to people, you discover that no one actually has the problem that your product solves. This is always a hard reality to accept, but it is better to accept reality than continue to throw good money after bad.
- Or maybe the problem isn’t quite that dire. Perhaps you discover that the market is smaller than you had anticipated – some buyers have already purchased, but the potentials tell you that they simply do not need your product and don’t have the problems you solve. This situation can also be somewhat disheartening, but take heart in knowing that you’ve helped your company prepare for the future. This segment will not yield the expected profit, and we have to be prepared to look elsewhere.
- Sometimes we discover that there are companies out there who still have the problems that we solve, but these companies can’t buy our product until they make some other change in their organization. Perhaps they need to upgrade their systems, invest in robotics, or create a design department before they’re actually ready to buy our product. This might impact your expected timeline, but it also might help you figure out your marketing approach. For instance, if they need to create a design department, then perhaps part of our thought leadership is focused on the reason why companies need design departments and how to get that started, so that we speed them up to make that change and get them ready to actually buy our product.
- When we interact with our market, we might discover that current customers are quite happy with the technology. However, potential buyers are not yet interested in the solution. When we dive in, we see in many cases that the potentials in the market do have the problems that we solve, but they may solve them in a slightly different way. Maybe they need to be operating on a different operating system than the rest of the market, or perhaps they need a whole new set of functionality. Perhaps they really like what you do, but they need it to operate with an entirely different system. These changes are somewhat expensive to the level that they might require a business case showing why making this investment would positively impact your profitability.
- Similarly, we might discover that companies who have not yet bought our product are waiting on a few small enhancements. Perhaps they’re really looking for you to integrate with one of their existing systems, or they need the ability to produce a certain type of report. These are smaller needs, things that you might be able to solve by writing a few requirements and implementing some enhancements into the existing product.
- I saved the best for last, even though this happens more frequently than you might imagine. Perhaps when you go out and start having authentic conversations with people in the market, with your potential buyers in particular, they tell you, “We absolutely have the problem that you’re solving. We absolutely are looking for a solution; we just didn’t know that a solution existed.” While you’re probably going to feel slightly horrified when you hear this, this is the easiest problem to solve. You have a great product; the market doesn’t know about it. Go back to the office and build a marketing plan that will generate awareness and interest in those people in your market who already need your product. This is the best problem to find.
Even if we don’t own the revenue or the expenses, product management owns profitability. To investigate how to improve your profitability, go out into the market. Connect with and understand your potential customers to figure out why they’re not buying your product.
Ci2 Advisors focuses on helping product management and product marketing professionals create authentic connections inside and outside their companies. Check out our virtual, open-enrollment workshops at https://ci2advisors.com/workshop/ .
