How do your customers find your product?

If customers do not discover your product, they will not buy your product or increase sales. The following questions can help you assess how likely customers are to discover your innovative new product or service.

First, are customers motivated to search? Do they recognize that they have a need and that there could be a better solution? Are they willing to invest effort to find that solution? If customers do not know a better option is possible, they cannot be motivated to look for it. How much does the solution differ from existing options? If this is the first major innovation in the industry for 20 years, customers are less likely to be searching for new alternatives than if the industry has had a steady stream of major innovations.

We have found that the most concrete measure of how motivated customers are to search is the length of their procurement or decision process.

In general, the customers that buy most quickly have a market pain that they have identified and where a product has been presented as an effective solution. Of course the size of the purchasing decision and impact of any purchase are also factors. For example, people all spend significantly more time researching an automobile purchase than they do where to have dinner.

Second, are your customers able to search effectively? Traditionally, the litmus test for this question was whether the information was at the top of an internet search (hence all the SEO companies). As long as customers have the expertise to interpret the specifications they find, features on the specification sheet are generally searchable. If the decision is important enough but customers lack expertise, they may still be able to search by turning to expert advisers or reviews from other customers (inferences).

Helping Customers Recognize Innovation

It is clear that developing great products is not enough to ensure commercial success —

Companies have to develop great products that customers can recognize as great.

Fortunately, we now have effective tools and processes for understanding the way that customers collect information and make purchasing decisions. Rather than merely surveying to determine what customers need, we have to seek a deeper understanding about how customers will evaluate which products have value that will satisfy their needs.

Customers need to be motivated to learn about products and also have the expertise to interpret what they learn. When that happens we can expect the search process to play an important role in their decisions – a welcome situation for the most innovative companies because customers are more likely to recognize the value of their innovations. However, when customers are either not sufficiently motivated or not sufficiently informed, then search will give way to inference which makes it less likely that customers will recognize the value of innovations. The implications for companies are clear: Focus product development on the innovations that your customers can recognize and understand the value they get, or find ways to alert them to innovations they may not detect on their own.

The “Useable Design Process” addresses the need to design a great product that connects to a specific customer segment that recognizes its value. We use a “beachhead concept” in customer discovery, looking for the smallest immediately addressable market. In our approach we try to capture >50% of the first target and grow from there rather than trying to build a product that hopes to capture 1% of a huge market. This allows us to refine and direct our message so that the customers with the greatest pain – the ones who buy most quickly are the focus.

Useable works with startups to fund & execute on their ideas. We’re strategists, financial professionals, and coders ourselves. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to make beautiful, functional products, that people adopt and use. We use our keen understanding of User Experience Design in every aspect of our business from product creation to customer acquisition and finding the right channels and partners. We bring over 20 years of Experience-Centered Innovation processes that keep products lean, focused, and on point with users. Through our process, our clients launch products that receive customer validation early in the planning through launch. Investing in this process up front works, and delivers products that win.

Though we work with and fund all types of startups, we’re especially interested in web/mobile applications and IoT. We’ve been focused on solving many of the difficult problems that all companies have with user experience design, brand development, customer acquisition, and the delivery of a valuable experience that makes products "sticky" longer than anyone else. With projects completed for dozens of companies and dozens more already curated through our portfolio management process we can visualize the possibilities of a wide range of web enabled platforms.

Connect with me here on LinkedIn or at [email protected]