How can you use customer validation to identify potential partnerships?

1 Why partnerships matter

Partnerships can be a powerful way to accelerate your innovation and gain a competitive edge. They can help you access complementary resources, skills, or capabilities that you don't have or can't afford. They can also help you expand your customer base, distribution channels, or geographic coverage. Partnerships can also reduce your risks, costs, or dependencies by sharing them with others. However, partnerships are not easy to establish and maintain. They require trust, alignment, and coordination between the partners, and they may involve trade-offs, conflicts, or compromises.

2 How to use customer validation to identify partners

One of the best ways to find potential partners is to use customer validation to understand your target market and the problems you are solving for them. By talking to customers, you can discover their pain points, goals, and expectations, and how your solution fits into their context. You can also learn about their current or alternative solutions, and who provides them. This can help you identify potential partners who offer complementary or adjacent products or services that can enhance your value proposition or fill a gap in your offering.

3 How to use customer validation to evaluate partners

Once you have a list of potential partners, you need to validate whether they are a good fit for your innovation and your goals. You can use customer validation to test your assumptions and hypotheses about the benefits and challenges of partnering with them. You can also use customer validation to assess the demand and feasibility of a joint offering, and the value proposition and pricing strategy for it. You can do this by creating a minimum viable partnership (MVP), which is a low-cost and low-risk way to experiment with a partner and get feedback from customers.

4 How to use customer validation to negotiate partnerships

After you have validated your potential partners and your joint offering, you need to negotiate the terms and conditions of the partnership. You can use customer validation to support your arguments and proposals, and to demonstrate your value and credibility. You can also use customer validation to address any concerns or objections that the partner may have, and to find common ground and mutual benefits. You can do this by using data and evidence from your customer interviews, surveys, or experiments, and by showing how the partnership can create value for both parties and their customers.

5 How to use customer validation to maintain partnerships

Finally, you need to use customer validation to maintain and improve your partnerships over time. You need to keep communicating and collaborating with your partners, and to monitor and measure the performance and impact of the partnership. You also need to keep validating your assumptions and hypotheses, and to adapt and iterate your joint offering based on customer feedback and changing needs. You can do this by using customer validation tools and methods, such as lean canvas, value proposition canvas, or business model canvas, and by conducting regular customer reviews, tests, or pilots.

Customer validation is not only a way to validate your innovation, but also a way to identify, evaluate, negotiate, and maintain potential partnerships that can help you grow and succeed. By using customer validation, you can find and work with partners who share your vision, values, and goals, and who can enhance your innovation and delight your customers.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?