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100s of battles won't faze you if you know 2 things

100s of battles won't faze you if you know 2 things

September 16, 2022

In this issue, you'll learn:

1. The 2 prerequisites to value proposition

2. An Example of a SaaS Business

Reading time: 2 minutes.

Customer before products and services

The business model revolves around your value proposition.

It's the reason why people buy from you.

What needs are you fulfilling? Or problems you are solving?

You are on the right track if you can list these as use cases that you can get from your current customers and test.

It needs to be linked to the type of person you want to buy from you.

“If you know the enemy Customer and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

If you know yourself but not the enemy Customer, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy Customer nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Business Sun Tzu, The Art of War

So, 100% conversion when you know both, 50% when you know your services only, and 0% when you know both. Statistics from the past:)

Pain relievers are the most valuable thing to offer. Painkillers is what we call them. Why just ease pain if you can kill it? Yes, it does depend on the kind of pain.

But first you have to know who the customer is. What do his jobs involve? We call these processes "workflows." Your solution is useless if the customer doesn't have workflows that work with it or isn't ready for the workflow.

An example: Meeting mgmt SaaS

Typical customer pains around meetings:

People call for meetings when a short Loom video, email, or audio message could do.
People call for meetings without a clear purpose, an agenda, or location.
People call for meetings with no defined meeting roles to keep time, write notes, or lead the meeting.
People are not sending materials or pre-reading before hand.
No collaboration on meeting preparation.
People get sidetracked from the agenda.
Meetings start late, meetings finish late, and they may take double the time.
Meeting minutes are not sent.
It's hard to write up meeting minutes because you have to get everyone's names, emails, positions, and format, send, and attach the notes.
The action items are isolated from other task management systems.

These are just a few of the aches and pains.

If the customer is not used to creating meeting notes, or defining roles for the meeting, or preparing for meetings, or creating action plans, then it is another marketing LinkedIn message in your inbox.

Also, if RTL (Right to Lift) language support is important to your customer, and your solution does not support that at all, then you are wasting the time of both parties.

Create an MVP that addresses that 20/80, 10/90, or even 1/50 feature/impact and expand to address more and more pains of your ideal customer profile.

So:

1-Start with your ideal customer workflow. We use process classification frameworks to scope these workflows.

2-A brainstorming session with the customer, potential customers, and the teams helps to list the pains and the gains. We use Mural for that, with its timer, voting session features, and value proposition template.

3-Brainstorm possible gain creators and pain relievers and prioritize them with a suitable prioritization framework like the MoSCoW method.

4-Make your products and services relevant. All of your product development or concept to product work is to follow the process to become effective.

5-Methods and frameworks like design thinking are great to this end.

The term "business to business (B2B)" was thus changed to business for business (B4B).

which is a term that is used in some circles, like the TSIA association.

Wrap up

1-Know your customer's workflows

2-Know their pains

3-Know the gains he could achieve

4-Prioritize using MoSCow and 1/50%

5-Brainstorm the gain creators and pain relievers for that 1%.

6-Develop your "concept to product" accordingly.

Market research, or lean startup, or at least customer interviews and deep dives, is what you need. Design thinking is the best way I know of to achieve these results.

In the next issue, we will talk more about the different areas of the value proposition.