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Head of Customer Development: Lead and execute customer development as an integrated member of the startup team. The Playbook acts as sales leader to move the product and the organization through the sales learning curve and build the foundation for a dedicated sales and marketing capability.
Customer Development Coach and Process Leader: Many startups have the talent and capabilities to perform customer development but need a resource to coach the process and the execution. The Playbook acts as a process leader to chaperone startup teams through customer development and help build a dedicated sales capability once the company is ready to execute The Playbook.
Business Planning Support: Perform customer discovery activities to support business model and value proposition tied to business plan for fund raising purposes and enhance pre-money venture capital valuations. The Playbook can assume role as Head of Customer Development during fund raising process and/or act as a strategic consultant to perform customer discovery activities.
TRANSLATE
Company vision and technology attributes to a proposed market strategy that solves customer problems
TEST
The market hypothesis in customer discovery and identify early adopters poised to become product evangelists
INTEGRATE
The product development team into the customer development process
BUILD
Your pitch and sales collateral based on the customer segment you can satisfy now to gain traction
VALIDATE
The sales Playbook with winning tactics and high close rate
LAUNCH
Your marketing Playbook to generate customer demand in the target market
TRANSITION
From a Customer Development process to a dedicated, scalable sales and marketing team
All early-stage companies perform Customer Development, consciously or unconsciously. Customer Development is the learning process on how to identify, qualify, capture and retain accessible customer segments that have an acute need for your innovative product. It ultimately defines commercialization success.
Customer Development is an iterative process where the emphasis is on learning from customer interactions to quickly identify the strongest product/market fit and set a clear course for the product development road map.
Customer Development is a collective, synchronized initiative including the product development team and organization’s founders and visionaries centered around demonstrating a scalable, profitable business model.
Product development flows from feasibility, design, development, validation, tech transfer, and production scale-up. Before a product can be scaled to production confidently, teams navigate the design and development learning curve that ultimately results in a reproducible product that meets customer requirements.
The same goes for Customer Development. Scalable, profitable customer segments do not appear on their own. Markets hypothesized in business plans rarely end up being the right product/market fit. Customer segments are discovered, developed, validated, and translated to a reproducible sales process with a high conversion rate.
Product development without a parallel effort in Customer Development results in a scattered, unscalable sales strategy that limits growth potential and risks the viability of the business.
