It's Wednesday and I Just grabbed my coffee and ready to work on what truly matters; the product that my customers are paying me money for.
Having been in the entrepreneurial space for a few years now (mostly not succesful), I never really figured out, HOW can I figure out what my customers WANT and NEED?
A few months ago I finally figured I'd do something I should have done A LOOONG time ago.
I went to my favorite website Google.com (Not self promotion, not my website) and looked up "market research company" (in my own native language).
I didn't find many companies but I found rather a lot of sales companies and advertising agencies.
But when I digged deeper, I found a few companies that specialised in calling different business or consumers and ask them questions that you want them to ask.
In other words, they do market research and lead generation by phone.
Now I figured, "no way they can get in contact with enough companies to give a proper view and be within a budget that a startup or small company can afford."
So I went to the website of one of these companies.
WARNING: This part is when a lot of people will FAIL and therefore NOT progress on their business.
- And that is despite the fact that this is an easy task
I called the company I found.
The company is relatively small with around 30-40 employees.
Explaining my situation and what I need I was quickly transferred to the owner of the company.
The owner being a very friendly, kind and most importantly, he was listening to the needs we have in the company.
The product we are developing is a product for the beauty salon owners, so we needed their voice to know if what we wanted to create will be useful for them.
- And they are BUSY people
He told me they had dealt with that before on behalf of a huge make up brand (think French), where they just called a lot of these salons and tried to get a few minutes of their time.
I decided to check up on their company and check their testimonials and current customers.
Everything looked solid.
So we went to talk price, and he said they could get a hold of 100-200 salon owners within the next 2 weeks for approximately $1,250.
With my quick math skills (Spotlight) I figured thats approximately $8 per opinion from a beauty salon owner, if they get a hold of 150 salon owners.
Considering I also live in a Scandinavian country with very relatively high salaries, this was a STEAL.
I signed the deal and we are started the process.
We defined around 5-6 questions that were important for my business and they started calling salon owners.
Now I've been receiving daily reports in the form of excel sheets with business name, answers etc., for about a week now.
And the insight is GOLD.
Many of my thoughts about the market were right, but many were also WRONG.
I think these wrong thoughts could have costed me several thousands of dollars in useless product development or lost revenue.
So what is the take away?
Well for me I learned something important.
I don't need to spend half my days calling my target group for weeks.
I can for a "smaller" amount get key insight provided by people who are way more experienced than I am with cold calling.
If you sell anything, you need to know what the people you are selling to are thinking. What do they need? Why? What is important?
And you don't need to spend half your days calling these businesses, unless you have the time.
For the most part, you should be able to find a company like this or a freelancer, who can do that for you.
And don't be cheap and think its a waste of money, this is truly an investment into the future of your business and thus the future of yourself.
Another thing is that once you do this, you committed financially to your idea, so now you have to do something about the problems your potential customers are having.
Of course if there is no need for your solution at all then move on, but what you will probably discover is that other needs will present themselves just from the answers they are giving.
Just sharing my experience and I hope at least one person here will find it useful!
Having been in the entrepreneurial space for a few years now (mostly not succesful), I never really figured out, HOW can I figure out what my customers WANT and NEED?
A few months ago I finally figured I'd do something I should have done A LOOONG time ago.
I went to my favorite website Google.com (Not self promotion, not my website) and looked up "market research company" (in my own native language).
I didn't find many companies but I found rather a lot of sales companies and advertising agencies.
But when I digged deeper, I found a few companies that specialised in calling different business or consumers and ask them questions that you want them to ask.
In other words, they do market research and lead generation by phone.
Now I figured, "no way they can get in contact with enough companies to give a proper view and be within a budget that a startup or small company can afford."
So I went to the website of one of these companies.
WARNING: This part is when a lot of people will FAIL and therefore NOT progress on their business.
- And that is despite the fact that this is an easy task
I called the company I found.
The company is relatively small with around 30-40 employees.
Explaining my situation and what I need I was quickly transferred to the owner of the company.
The owner being a very friendly, kind and most importantly, he was listening to the needs we have in the company.
The product we are developing is a product for the beauty salon owners, so we needed their voice to know if what we wanted to create will be useful for them.
- And they are BUSY people
He told me they had dealt with that before on behalf of a huge make up brand (think French), where they just called a lot of these salons and tried to get a few minutes of their time.
I decided to check up on their company and check their testimonials and current customers.
Everything looked solid.
So we went to talk price, and he said they could get a hold of 100-200 salon owners within the next 2 weeks for approximately $1,250.
With my quick math skills (Spotlight) I figured thats approximately $8 per opinion from a beauty salon owner, if they get a hold of 150 salon owners.
Considering I also live in a Scandinavian country with very relatively high salaries, this was a STEAL.
I signed the deal and we are started the process.
We defined around 5-6 questions that were important for my business and they started calling salon owners.
Now I've been receiving daily reports in the form of excel sheets with business name, answers etc., for about a week now.
And the insight is GOLD.
Many of my thoughts about the market were right, but many were also WRONG.
I think these wrong thoughts could have costed me several thousands of dollars in useless product development or lost revenue.
So what is the take away?
Well for me I learned something important.
I don't need to spend half my days calling my target group for weeks.
I can for a "smaller" amount get key insight provided by people who are way more experienced than I am with cold calling.
If you sell anything, you need to know what the people you are selling to are thinking. What do they need? Why? What is important?
And you don't need to spend half your days calling these businesses, unless you have the time.
For the most part, you should be able to find a company like this or a freelancer, who can do that for you.
And don't be cheap and think its a waste of money, this is truly an investment into the future of your business and thus the future of yourself.
Another thing is that once you do this, you committed financially to your idea, so now you have to do something about the problems your potential customers are having.
Of course if there is no need for your solution at all then move on, but what you will probably discover is that other needs will present themselves just from the answers they are giving.
Just sharing my experience and I hope at least one person here will find it useful!
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