Every Customer to be treated as a FIRST ever Customer.

How does a company act when it is trying to acquire a first ever customer?

Having an idea is always a great first step, then your product is built and ready for the market. But now you have to learn how to acquire a customer for your product. How can you do this?

A company or team will go to an extreme length to build a product, with the assumption that everything goes great with the product, features, quality, market readiness for consumption etc. One of the biggest milestones is to ‘acquire the first customer who is willing to PAY’ i.e., a real testimonial that someone is ready to pay money and validate the product. It is not easy to acquire such a customer. On the negotiation table, we are often ready to incorporate 100% of the requirements the customer is asking, and every team member will work late nights to make this happen. To fulfill the customer’s requirements, the team’s dedication will be the best in the company’s history in terms of productivity. Why so?

Getting the FIRST customer who is?interested in your product is the lifeline for the next phase of the product. At this juncture, every member of engineering, sales, marketing, and product management will put their best effort in reaching this feat. The key recipe for success is created by establishing ACCOUNTABILITY across all the teams, every team member will contribute to receive a five-star review from their customer.

Fast forward some time. ater acquiring more customers, the target of ‘acquire a FIRST customer’ becomes “acquire a Number of customers”. Change in the goal statement also calls for the change in ‘accountability’. In the new goal setting, it becomes the SOLE responsibility of the sales team or some OTHER team to get the required number of customers. This gives more space for other teams to be more relaxed, and the priority of the customer requirements will take a back seat. These next set of activities directly impact the revenue streams in an adverse way. Once the revenue is being impacted, the burden falls on all the teams that are involved with this product/service.

One way to avoid all this noise is to follow the mantra “Treat each customer as a FIRST Customer". This is a different approach from the common slogan “Customer First” that you often come across within the industry. Will explain difference between ‘First Customer’ vs ‘Customer First’ in a short while... Happy Reading.