The three things you must know about your customers

Every great product, every successful sales & marketing plan, starts with the customer. As you build product and go-to-market plans moving forward, make sure you can crisply answer these three questions:

1. Who is our customer? You want a crisp definition here, a solid profile and/or persona that tells your entire team who you’re building for and selling to. Who are they, what are they doing, where did they come from, and where are they going.
2. What does the customer want? Think in terms of outcomes, not solutions. What does success look like for your customer, not with your product but overall? What are their objectives in the coming months or year? What’s waking them up at night, and what do they think about when they get up in the morning? Can you map what you’re doing to what your customer really needs and wants?
3. What does the customer value enough to pay for now? This is where value translation comes in. There’s an acuteness of want & need here that moves from “nice to have” to “must have” in a way that builds enough urgency to make a move and buy.

How well can you answer these questions? More importantly, how confident are you that your product, sales and marketing strategies are built around the right answers?