The greatest growth opportunities are on the edges of the use of our product/services. Or, on the edges of the 5Rs of Growth. We must make a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edges of these 5Rs. When we envision tomorrow’s best product or service being used in our customer’s future, it creates far-reaching possibilities. It is this type of thinking of our customer’s business, the edges of their business, and the edges of the 5Rs that are needed for growth.
Every startup has different nuances, but I have found outside of having a bad idea, the area that distinguished startup marketing more so than any other area is developing product/market fit or your target customers. Most startups are affected by what might be called the China Syndrome. There are “x” amount of people, I will get x amount of market share. So if there are a billion people in China, I certainly should be able to get a handful for my product/service. All I need is a little marketing.
Since I don’t believe the above; I think finding your beachhead market is the most important thing you can do. Even more so than have a minimum viable product. If we have an MVP and an established Target Market/Customer, we can develop the appropriate personas that we believe are correct. I like to use a persona or even a scenario type structure in the early stages of a start-up or a launch. It provides better clarity and focuses in moving a plan forward. When you do by markets and even Key accounts to some extent, you tend to generalize more or make broader assumptions. I would rather adjust because of too much focus versus adjusting because of too little focus. It is also cheaper this way if that has any relevance.
How do we develop new marketing working with existing customers? The left side of the matrix below will give us the most successful outcomes. There is less risk and costs are more controlled. You are developing products and services internally and offering them to existing customers (top left), or you just become more efficient and effective offering product/services (bottom left).
An understatement is that by offering new customers and new products (top right) is a more high risk and is NOT a revenue producer. 99.9% of the time it drains revenue and time. It is not that it is a bad thing, but it is an investment of resources. This leaves us with the developing new customers with existing products/services or needs. Again, it is a partial investment of resources with a little less risk than top right but more than the top left.
To reduce that risk and hopefully make a little money from it a couple things need to happen. Our marketing and sales efforts need to move incrementally from the left into the bottom right quadrant.
We go with what we know, the edges of our customers and migrating away from the target customer into an adjacent market with similar behaviors. The things we are doing now should be similar, same sales process, same products (maybe re-labeled), same marketing channels, etc. This way we go to what is known to work and adapt to the new market. It is much easier to determine what needs to be adjusted if we are working on a process that works somewhere else.
The more you move to the upper right-hand corner the more risk you take. My belief is that you have to be in each quadrant. However, the amount of time, money and resources you put in each quadrant will differ for each company. What is your risk tolerance may be the over-riding factor but often it is determined by existing legacy structure and culture.
CAP-Do (More Info): What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers. It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.