Why talk to customers? What do they know?

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From the course by University of Maryland, College Park

Building the Business Model for Corporate Entrepreneurs

32 оценки

University of Maryland, College Park

Building the Business Model for Corporate Entrepreneurs

32 оценки

Course 2 of 5 in the Specialization Corporate Entrepreneurship: Innovating within Corporations

Led by Dan Gordon, a University of Maryland faculty member who teaches business modeling in the National Science Foundation's I-Corps Program, this course enables you to develop and apply the Business Model Canvas tool to scope a corporate challenge or opportunity. You will learn how to identify and communicate the nine elements of a business model: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partners, and Cost Structure. Your completed project will be a customer-validated Business Model Canvas that outlines the business case for a new product or service to address your selected challenge or opportunity in a corporate context. This project is derived from four areas of focus in the course: • Identifying how to create and deliver value for existing and future customers of the company; • Learning how to extract value for the corporate venture in a sustainable fashion; • Conducting in-depth interviews to guide the customer discovery process for your corporate venture; and • Developing business models that encompass the product or service, customers, and economic engine that deliver on the corporate venture objectives. Try this course for FREE at https://www.coursera.org/learn/corporate-entrepreneurs-business-model

From the lesson

Customer Discovery and Customer Validation

In this module, we will examine how to identify real customers and conduct in-depth interviews to guide the customer discovery process for the corporate venture.

Welcome to Week Two2:36

Why talk to customers? What do they know?5:22

How to get insights from customers11:28

Building a pipeline of customer interviews5:29

What to do before the interview5:21

What to do after the interview3:53

Cold calling 1016:02

Meet the Instructors

Daniel Gordon
Lecturer of Technology Entrepreneurship
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech)

This week we're going to talk about talking to customers.

We're going to start the process of speaking to a lot of customers.

We're going to ask you to talk to 100 customers

during the course of the 12 weeks.

And so, I think a little preparation, a little training in how to talk to

them is going to stand you in good stead as we go forward.

But the first thing we want to talk about is, why talk to customers at all?

What do they even know?

Why even speak to them?

If you know it all already,

why should you talk to somebody that you haven't talked to?

And inevitably in a group, if we were interactive,

inevitability someone would raise their hand and say, what about Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs didn't talk to customers.

If Steve Jobs didn't talk to customers, why do I have to talk to customers?

Well there's two answers to that.

First of all, you're not Steve Jobs, more than likely.

God bless you if you are, but more than likely you're not.

But second of all, Steve Jobs did talk to customers.

Steve Jobs got a lot of his ideas about what customers wanted

from talking to them.

He didn't get ideas about what the product should be from customers, but

he got ideas about what should be in the product, from talking to customers.

That's where his ideas came from.

What do costumers know?

Costumers know about themselves, they know what they like,

they know what they don't like, they know what gives them pain,

they know what their worries are, they know what problems they have.

The problem with customers is that they don't always know that they know these

things.

So when you talked to customers you're going to have to get the information

out of them, even though they don't know that they know it.

They can tell you what they like but they do it indirectly.

And so when you talk to customers you're trying to do two things.

You're trying to identify their pains and

their problems because that's what they know.

But you're trying to do it indirectly.

And you're going to have to work hard to get the information out of the interviews

that you do.

All of this is not to help define the product.

It's to help you know once you go into it.

So how do you gain insight from a tacit expert?

Somebody who knows something but they don't know that they know it.

You get them talking.

That's the basic thing you want to do.

You want to get them going into their entire situation,

their lives, their problems, their job, their worries.

And once you've got them talking, then you're going to want to guide them toward

the kinds of questions that you want to ask, and

you have to ask those questions in the right way.

You're going to have to listen for answers that you didn't expect, because they're

going to say things that are going to take you off your expected course and

you're going to have to course correct.

You're going to have to think about the interviews before you do them, and

then you're going to have to do work on them after you've done them.

Because that's where the work of extracting the insight comes.

You go over the interview.

Say, why did they say this to that?

What were they talking about here?

Why did they look uneasy when they said this thing?

Those are the kinds of questions you have to ask in order to get to the kind

of answers you need.

If you think about the life of a customer,

if you think about how a customer is, I call it The Tower of Wishes and Woes.

They've got a hierarchy of things that bug them or interest them.

At the very top, maybe, you've something like my child's education.

Everyone cares about their child's education,

nobody wants their child not to have an education.

It's way up at the top.

And way at the bottom is probably something like world peace.

Everyone cares about world peace, but

you know what, we don't expect to be able to do much about it, one way or the other.

So in between are all the things that concern you as

somebody who's developing a solution for this customer.

Maybe right underneath my child's education is pleasing my boss.

Who doesn't want to make their boss happy?

And then underneath that is probably not looking like an idiot.

Nobody wants to look like a fool.

So you do things that make you not look like a fool.

Maybe underneath that is something like, am I a good person?

I think most people, this maybe a minority of you but

I think most people want to believe that they're good.

So that's up there too.

Then you start getting into things like increasing revenues and

saving costs, they're way down on the mix.

They're just a hair above world peace if you will.

They're important, but it's much more important to please my boss.

If I can please my boss by saving costs or please my boss by increasing revenues,

then I will do that, but I don't care much about them in their own right.

That's a good thing to bear in mind as you talk to customers.

So, these are the main points about talking to customers, the kinds of things

you're going to learn from them and how you're going to learn from them.

They define their problems and you define the product.

So they're going to tell you what they need and

you're going to tell them how to get it.

They're experts on their own problems although they don't always

know what they know.

So they don't always know how to talk about what they know.

They have a hierarchy of concerns and wishes and

you're trying to get at that hierarchy in order to understand

where the problem that you're going to solve fits in.

If it's not near the top, you got a problem.

And finally, listening to customers is going to tell you where you fit in, and

listening, extracting the information, and working hard.

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