Go To Your Customers

When I was in high school my father had just reached retirement after 35 years in commercial banking and was eager to share the wealth of experiences that he'd accumulated. The one concept that the pounded into my head week after week when discussing business was, "Go to your customers!" Though it's fundamental to the marketing process, many entrepreneurs that I've seen to date think it's inconvenient and ignore it for a number of reasons. Examples are (paraphrased from what I've heard):

1. "I don't have any patents and I don't want to risk making the idea public until I make some headway into developing the product"
2. "Customers don't want to take time to talk to us, and if they do they don't put thought into surveys."
3. "How can you go to your customers if you don't have any yet"?

My time as a consultant at the Wharton Small Business Development Center showed me how important it was to ignore these excuses. Don't get me wrong, they are legitimate concerns that certainly make the process more difficult but they aren't good enough to make it impossible. Most of our clients had strong business plans with graphs/tables/quotes from research reports but were still unable to meet their sales targets because they were lacking enough data points from interviewing potential/existing clients. Indeed, gathering and analyzing this information was probably our biggest value-add activity. Did we sometimes come across difficult (and even rude) people? Yes. Were people often rushed and able to answer only a tenth of our questions? Yes. But the answers to the few questions that we managed to ask were sometimes so insightful that we were able to make small adjustments to our clients' business models and help them grow revenues significantly. This is a lesson that my partner and I are taking forward in the process of developing our business plan.

The Bottom Line: You've done your secondary research and developed some important hypotheses on what the customer should want. It's up to you to prove that this is what the customer does want before investing a single dime into the business. IF you find that the costs to reaching your clients/acquiring this information are too large, you may want to rethink whether you really want to risk being in this business.

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