How do you conduct customer discovery for B2B or niche markets?

Defining your customer segments is an important aspect of product development, particularly in the B2B or niche market context. It involves validating your problem-solution fit, gaining insights into your target customers, and creating a value proposition that aligns with their specific needs and expectations. However, conducting customer discovery for B2B or niche markets can be challenging due to the limited number of potential customers, their relative difficulty to reach, and their diverse characteristics. To tackle this challenge, here are some tips and best practices to guide you through the process of customer discovery in such markets

Segmenting is vital to messaging - understanding the specific wants and needs of a segment is both easier and more effective than trying to appeal to the whole market at once, and allows your development and marketing teams to frame features as benefits. The phrase to remember here is "Try to sell to everyone, end up selling to no one"

Finding early adopters is crucial for the success of a new product or service. These are the customers who are willing to try something new and innovative, providing valuable feedback and acting as advocates for your offering. Here are some steps to find your early adopters: 1. Define your ideal customer profile 2. Engage with industry communities 3. Seek out influencers 4. Leverage existing networks 5. Offer incentives 6. Attend industry events and conferences 7. Monitor online communities and reviews.

Early adopters of SaaS products tend be tinkerers… Avoid making product decisions based off of the opinions of tinkerers, as tinkerers generally do NOT represent your customer avatar. To make sure that your early adopters represent your ideal customer avatar accurately, you must qualify them by charging them at least some nominal fee to use your beta. If they aren’t willing to spend money then - while these users may try out your product and provide feedback, that feedback could easily lead you down wasteful rabbit holes that slow down your traction and prolong your journey to product market fit.

Conducting customer interviews is an essential part of the customer discovery process. It allows you to gather insights, validate assumptions, and understand your customers' needs and preferences. Here are some important points to remember when conducting customer interviews; 1. Prepare a structured interview guide 2. Start with an introduction 3. Ask open-ended questions 4. Listen actively 5. Dig deeper 6. Respect their time 7. Maintain neutrality 8. Respect confidentiality 9. Take notes or record the interview 10. Express gratitude

This article is basically referring to Voice of Customer interviews and surveys. Use this feedback to inform your product strategy and also to refine the language you use in your marketing collateral so that it best matches, well, the voice of the customer.

Identify your 80/20 accounts and the stakeholders within each Have discussions at customer on what they want, how you are performing against the competition, how to improve, new products, post sale expectations, how they evaluate in the selection process. Supplement these with qualitative phone interviews. Use web surveys only to give you more robustness of the data. Web surveys are terrible at generating insights. Identify top three to five issues. What are the root causes. What is controllable by company. Develop initiatives which may be for general market or specific large accounts. Launch initiatives and provide closed ended feedback. Review in 18 months. Are we closing the gap? Audit and fine tune. Rinse and repeat.

Remember that it is easy to get attached to features you have spent a lot of time on, but if those features aren't turning into tangible benefits for users you have to have the flexibility to change them, signpost them more clearly or be prepared to do away with them all together. This phase also eliminates assumptions of usability based on familiarity - as developers it can be easy to forget that your users have little time and mental space to work out how to use your product, so heuristics (instinctively knowing what to do) or lack of them quickly emerge at this stage, which can be invaluable.

Identifying key partners, whether they be other organisations or actual consumers, is a vital method of spreading the word. They should already have the connections and respect of the markets you are seeking to enter. Involving them - even slightly - in the development processes mentioned above gives them a sense of ownership of the product, making them far more likely to be an independent and ongoing advocate of the product to their peers.

As Isabel points out - this is an ongoing process - listening, responding and continuously developing are the hallmarks of many successful brands and products - just as failing to do so is a recurrent trait of those that fail Some comparative examples: Social Media: Facebook (Listened and changed) vs Google Plus (didn't) Mobile Phones: Apple and Samsung (Listened and changed) vs Motorola and Nokia (didn't) Fast Food: MacDonalds and Arby's (listened and changed) vs Wimpy and Big Boy (didn't) It's easy to see the the connection between current success levels and consumer responsiveness.