Most important detail of buyer personas

If any of you spend any time reading or watching what is going on in marketing you'll know there has been a lot of talk about things like ‘buyer personas’ where you use analytics and other big data type tools to understand the way your target buyers behave. All of it helps and there is no doubt about that, but I would suggest that for start ups, spin outs and small growing companies where the volume of data just isn’t available, there is a more effective and sensible way to go about this. Speak to your customers and your market regularly – have a cup of coffee, buy someone lunch, but most of all ask and listen.

The core of any really clear picture of a market and what it is that it wants can only ever really be based on direct discussion with your target buyers and there are a couple of reasons for this:

·      If you have read the You Moron entry on disruptive selling you will already know that everyone buys on an emotional level and you can only ever understand that by talking directly to your market to understand what the emotions attached to a purchase are, at least until someone develops an emotional data warehouse anyway.

·      Markets never actually buy what they need. Instead they buy what they perceive they need and there is not a data warehouse or internally generated buyer persona that includes the concept of perception of need. Without understanding the perception thing you are flying pretty much blind.

Every time we help a company get out into the market and start engaging potential customers directly the difference it makes to their understanding of the market is dramatic – kind of like turning on the lights. They always find that it gives them the powerful and in our experience essential information about emotion and perception that unlocks the insight you need on what really drives market behavior.

Hope this helps and as always it would be great to hear others views and ideas on this.

The Market is Always Right

Well folks, here it is. We've been tweaking and tuning for the last couple of months to get it right, but finally I am very proud to launch the first part of the Backwards Business programme, designed to help companies and entrepreneurs go to market with a way, better chance of success than normal. So far results from the 1st group of customers show -

1. 20% achieving exceptional results way ahead of their business plans
2. 31% seeing significant improvements on their previous performance
3. 19% are seeing improvement and expect further improvement as they apply more of Backwards Business.

The market is always right overview from timsandford

As always its best view in full screen. If you have any questions on the programme or how to access it let me know and I'll be happy to help.

By Tim Sandford

Entrepreneurs and Markets - An Investigation

We are publishing this report a couple of weeks in advance of the formal launch of the Market is Always Right, the first and in some ways the most important module of the Backwards Business programme.

Here's the thing - with all the really high quality business support and advice available on the web, in print and through all sorts of other organisations, why are so many new businesses still failing to make the sales revenues they need to survive and then grow.

The link below takes you to the summary report that covers a piece of research we carried out last year with 100 companies in the UK to find out why. What we discovered may well surprise you and prompted us to introduce some additional material into the Market is Always Right module to help new businesses

Entrepreneurs and Markets - An investigation from timsandford

This is a report so it is definitely best view in full screen mode by clicking in the 4 arrows on the right hand side of the grey bar.

As always if you have any questions or want to talk through any of the findings, please feel free to get in touch.

You Moron - (Disruptive Sales and Marketing)

This week there will only be one entry and its going to focus on disruptive sales and marketing. For anyone in the technology market, the term will be familiar. However for anyone that has not heard the term before, a disruptive product or service is one that changes the way a market behaves or does effectively 'disrupting' the status quo.

If you handle this badly no matter what kind of product you are launching, it will literally turn the market against you, no matter how good your product is or how much the market will benefit by adopting it.

The blog is in the form of a slideshare presentation which you can access through the embedded screen below

You moron from timsandford

It's best viewed in full screen, which you can access by clicking on the four arrows on the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

By Tim Sandford

Failure is Good!

Last week my blog entries focused on market research and asking whether or not it is something you should consider before sinking your savings into a business.

I hope it provoked some positive thinking.

Today I would like to round off the brief series with a statement. Failure is good!

Just ask anyone who has ever succeeded. Thomas Edison even made a career of it and famously stated, Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward....

Testing your business ideas on the market is exactly the same as inventing the light bulb and the more disruptive your business idea is the more you need to make sure you really understand the market dynamics and sentiments. If you don’t, be prepared for an expensive failure as opposed to a good one.

The ten questions approach I outlined last week is proven to work and help businesses quickly and relatively easily find out whether their idea is good, bad or most likely -  'Could be good, but needs some refining and tuning to fit what the market wants.'  You can do this many, many times quickly and easily. By listening to the market and working with it, the market will come with you. It is in the interests of the market to do so.

The best part about it is simply that it only really costs time and done right helps you discard the parts of your idea that won’t work in the market and really focus in on those that do – why not make sure to stack the odds in your favour, no one else will?

There will be a couple of case studies about this when the book and updated site launch at the beginning of next month, but the bottom is this, when we have done this in the past on more than one occasion, it has led to companies winning some very big contracts right at the point when they launch. 

10 questions that are guaranteed help your business succeed.

In yesterday's blog we asked you whether or not you thought it was a good idea to really get under the skin of your market in order to give your business the very best chances of success?

We have already had plenty of folk come back and agree, but a lot have said they also are not sure how to do it or how to get hold of the right people to ask them questions - all of which is perfectly normal.

Here's the good news. If you learn some very basic rules about approaching potential buyers and asking for their help and input, you will be very happily surprised at how much people are prepared to help. Think of it this way, you are asking them to help you make a better product or service for them, so why wouldn't they?

I won't try to cover the rules in this blog because it would take ages and they are all covered elsewhere on our site or in the book. 

However what I do want to cover in this entry is the information you want to get and the questions you want answered. There are only 10, not more and very rarely less. You want answers to all of them, because when you start to combine the information you get from different questions, it pretty much gives you all the information you need to know whether or not you have a business idea that will work. The questions are listed below.

1. How many buyers are there in the market?
2. When is the market, is it mature, established and growing, new or not emerged yet?
3. Who are the buyers - (in B2B this means companies and individual roles in the companies)
4. Why will they buy your product?
5. How often will they buy your product?
6. How much will they pay for your product?
7. What do they expect your product to do for them?
8. What is the outcome they are looking for from your product?
9. What is your competition?
10. Where and how will they buy?

To explain the colour coding before I go on. Question one in red is a desktop research question that you do at the start and the end because the number of buyers you think there are before you start will be different when you finish. 

The questions highlighted in blue are the most important. These are the questions that tell what the market's motivation to buy is and what it is they really want to buy from you. (This is not about your product, but what your product does for your customer - the real reason they buy)

If the answers to these ten questions when you ask a reasonable sample of your market are all positive then you probably have a business. If they are not you may have to change and adapt your idea, but you know what, at that point in time, you probably know more about what the market wants than anyone else.

I hope this helps, because I know from lots and lots of experience that if you do not do this, you risk your savings in a very big way. 

There is one more blog in this brief series that I'll post on Monday. In the meantime have a great weekend everyone.

Its Your Money, Why Burn it?

I was editing one of the final chapters of the Market is Always Right this morning to get it ready for publishing and felt very inspired to ask a question in this week’s blog.

Right now more than 70% of new businesses don’t survive to their 3^rd anniversary.

We know from endless publications and pieces of research that in the main businesses simply run out of money because they can’t make the sales they need in order to survive. We also know that there is only one reason that companies don’t make sales – they are trying to sell something their market does not want to buy.

I find this surprising because when you consider starting a business, you pour in your passion, ambition, belief and your money to make it work. It takes over your life as you focus on your ambitions and your goals. All of this is brilliant and incredibly important, so why do so many fail to make the sales they need?

So here is the big question. While your ambitions and ideas are all great and I hope you achieve them all, what about the market’s needs?

Would it surprise you to know that in our experience and that of others a lot more than half of new businesses have nowhere near the level of market knowledge they need to maximize their chances of success?

This is quite surprising in some ways, because market research is incredibly inexpensive and you can do it yourself before you invest money in setting up the business and spending your savings on a business that is not fully developed and according to the stats, is therefore likely to fail – which is pretty much like burning your money you don’t need to.

This is not a negative post, in fact I hope you take it as a hint that there are some simple, low cost and very effective things you can do that will save you a lot of wasted money, time and stress simply by doing more to get to know your market as early as possible.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this theme with some ideas you might want to consider when researching your market.