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We’ve advised, mentored, and consulted with close to a hundred startups over the years and can count on one hand the number of companies that could quantify the impact their solution had on their customers and support those claims with solid evidence. It’s not easy for sure, but I guarantee that if you can build evidence to support the impact on your customer’s key metrics, you’ll find both sales and fundraising will be orders of magnitude easier. Let’s explore how to go about doing this by answering these five questions: 1) What are your target buyer persona’s key success metrics? Who is your target buyer and how do they measure their success? What are their critical problems or responsibilities and how are you able to support them? For example, if your target buyer persona is the VP Sales, it may be to improve their win/loss ratio, shorten the sales cycle or increase average contract value. If you’re trying to sell to the CEO, it may be to grow revenues, increase profitability or employee satisfaction. 2) How does your solution impact these key metrics? Frame your value proposition and messaging in terms of how you impact those key metrics. You may not be able to quantify your impact until the product is built and deployed, but you should be able to quantify the problem and you should be able to estimate the anticipated impact of your future solution. For example, Our calendar scheduling app is expected to save your sales reps 8 hours a week by removing frustrating customer back-and-forth emails so that your reps can set up more meetings faster and close more business. 3) Is the impact of your solution material to your customer’s business? The more precisely you understand and can measure drivers of your expected impact, the more successful your business will be. Is the problem material enough that target customers are motivated to change from the status quo to an unproven solution from a new vendor? What constitutes material is, of course, something you need to know and will also be linked to the customer’s adoption effort and risk to their business. For example, would a VP Sales implement a new calendar scheduling app if it saved 1 hour a week? Would they implement a new solution if it risked dropping the odd meeting invitation? Or if it took 3 months for IT to integrate it? If target customers are skeptical or struggling with accepting your anticipated impact on their metrics or they’re concerned about the implementation effort/risk, then perhaps seek independent (paid) validation such as an academic research paper, customer review, consultant report or perhaps even reference the results from an adjacent industry. 4) What key capabilities are you delivering that drive impact? Are they unique? What is unique about your solution that gives your customer confidence that you can deliver the anticipated impact on their business and that you can do it with manageable implementation effort and risk? As a product owner, this deep understanding can help you prioritize and direct your key features. For example, Our solution works behind the scenes to coordinate free/busy calendar availability for all participants and only recommends times when all parties are available. What’s more, it meets GDPR privacy requirements and can be implemented with one keyclick, so you can give it a try right now and then roll it out to your department when you’re ready. 5) Can you support those claims? Once you reach MVP, you should work with your first customers to measure your impact and use those metrics to unlock an enterprise-wide rollout, assuming initial deployment was contained to a small group. The results should be a call-to-action that forms an anchor in your sales and marketing communications plan. For example: If we can reduce the time your sales reps spend on scheduling meetings from 8 to under 1 hour a week, would you buy a site license? Or if we can help you schedule 10% more meetings a week during a one-month pilot, would you buy a site license? By the end of this exercise, you should be able to clearly quantify your benefit in a compelling way that will excite and inspire your customers, investors and employees. The format and structure are simple: Our [SOLUTION] helps [PERSONA] save [QUANTIFIED METRIC] by [CORE CAPABILITY] so that you can [BENEFIT]. Contact us to find out how. Collecting the evidence to support your claims is always the challenge. Regular readers of our blog know this is done with a structured customer discovery process designed to uncover the evidence you need. Armed with a quantified, high-impact business-centric message and the supporting evidence, you will be well on your path to product/market fit. Adam and Doug http://www.evidologygroup.com You know your product. We can help you sell it.

Learning from potential customers is arguably one of the most important and most challenging aspects of the new product development process. It is also certain to have the most impact on the success of your business. That’s why “discovery calls” are so important. Discovery calls are like feeling different parts of an elephant and require many discussions within and across representative organizations to truly understand the customer, their problems, what an ideal solution would look like and how they buy a solution such as yours. In this article, I’d like to share some best practices on how to find and recruit the right people to speak with in order to test your product concept. And then in future posts, we’ll explore best practices and structure of the discovery meeting itself. Feel Your Way Around The Elephant Many complex B2B solutions can touch and be influenced by several personas within an organization such as end users, business buyers, IT administrators and security professionals. Each will have a very different perspective on the nature of the problem and what they look for in a solution. Of course, in some organizations and for some solutions an individual may play multiple roles but still, the line of inquiry should span all aspects. Since you’re looking to learn, not sell, don’t restrict your discussion to just the budget-owner. Become Familiar With Elephants It often takes more than a dozen discussions to validate your product concept. You can quickly eliminate certain organization types and persona based on the response you get (both positive and negative). You know you’re “done” when you’re starting to hear the same feedback and you believe it’s representative of a homogeneous initial target market. Look for consistent insights in your discovery calls with different persona within and across representative organizations. Where to Find Elephants Finding enough suitable and interested candidates to interview can sometimes be a challenge. Here are a few good sources: Networking: It’s often easiest to start with friends who can share their insights, but be careful as friends may be inclined to tell you what you want to hear. Be certain to expand your network quickly, drawing on your professional network and the network of your investors and advisors. But moreover, at the wrap-up of each interview, ask if they can recommend others that you should speak with.   Articles and Papers: Contact authors and people quoted in relevant trade publications and research papers.   Conferences: Introduce yourself to speakers at conferences after their talk or in a follow-on email after the conference.   Social Media: Direct Message people on LinkedIn or Twitter either based on their profile or ideally about a post they made.   How to Approach The Elephant Be sure to reach out to prospective customers for an interview with respect and sensitivity.   You’re seeking advice: In my experience, people are generally happy to provide advice but get turned off very quickly if they feel like they’re being sold to or feel like you’re trying to convince them of something. Make sure this is clear in your outreach communications.   Position the discussion in advance: Explain the reason for your interview request in terms of the problem you’re looking to solve. If people are not responding to your interview requests, it may be because they are not experiencing the problem you’re describing or perhaps you’re not describing it in a way that resonates.   Be sensitive of time: Try to keep your time “ask” to 20 or 30-minutes, unless it’s a friend, someone close in your network or someone you know is keen on the topic. After establishing rapport in the first short conversation, you’re well-positioned to ask for a longer call in the future.   Personalization: It’s important that the person you’re reaching out to feels like you value their expertise. Hand-craft and customize each email and avoid bulk email campaign tools.   C-Suite Bottleneck: You may find that senior executives are too busy to meet with you or respond to your interview requests. You may try contacting them and ask for them to refer you to others in the organization. Alternatively, you may have better luck connecting directly with others in the organization.   Give back: In most cases, those who agree to talk want to be helpful and feel good about sharing their views and advice. In some cases, you may find people would appreciate you giving something back to them in return for their time. This could include a non-confidential summary of aspects of your industry survey; some relevant technology white paper or interesting article that demonstrates your subject matter expertise; or simply buying them coffee.   Through a series of productive interviews, you should get a good feel for the elephant from many different angles. You’ll learn how the customers’ problems manifest themselves, how big a problem it is for them, what an ideal solution looks like and how they go about evaluating and buying a potential solution such as yours. Here’s a sample outreach email to get you started on your customer discovery journey. For more information, please contact the Evidology Group and we’ll lead you through the process to achieve rewarding customer discussions. We’ll also share more tools, processes and examples on how to structure effective discovery calls. If you prefer, we can bring our expertise to your organization as an Embedded Executive and spearhead the process ourselves for even deeper insights, saving you precious time.