From my writings, you can tell that I believe meeting, talking, and observing the customer are critical steps in any new product development. I’ve also shared with you the importance of customer interactions.
However, for example, when discussing with some healthcare start-up founders, I found out that many still have some difficulties accessing “customers.” And that’ll be the focus of this article.
You’ll learn more as you read on.
Possible challenges with accessing customers
Here are a few, yet common examples where access to customers can be challenging:
- You are a start-up or small company
- You have an extremely limited budget
- You are addressing a completely new segment
- You are targeting new stakeholders
- You need customers in a new geographic area
- You have no KOL network
In these situations, for some product development teams, it could be hard to have regular and deep customer interactions. However, the worst thing that the team can do is not address the challenge and take risky decisions based on intuitions and poor customer data.
In fact, the result of not properly interacting with customers could be product market misalignment due to not satisfying customer needs, increased development time, rework, and useless features.
Let’s see together a few steps to avoid these terrible scenarios in a new medical product development.
Defining the customer
Before you even start looking for customer interactions, I suggest spending time understanding who your targeted customer will be. The idea is to define as much as possible the typical customer you foresee for your product.
I think it is a good practice to identify the profile of the early adopters, i.e. the potential customer who will take the risk to try the product before the rest of the market. The more specific you are the best it is.
And remember, early adopters are the people who have the problem you want to solve.
Sometimes they have a specific job to be done, or they belong to well-defined organizations, or they could be users of direct or indirect competition.
Using a combination of demographic, psychographic, and behavioral criteria you should be able to identify the commonalities across this targeted market segment.
For example, if you are developing a robot for general surgery and your idea is to include some features like:
- Quick to setup
- Low footprint
- Reduced complexity
- Easy integration of existing laparoscopic setups, and workflows
- Possibility to switch easily between the robotic approach to laparoscopic surgery
You might identify your early adopters as general surgeons specialized in a specific surgery who are looking for precision and minimal access thanks to assisted robotic surgery but are unhappy about the complexity and cost of the current robotic solutions.
If you plan to sell B2B, for example to hospitals, you should think about the different stakeholders involved in your sales process. Depending on the complexity of your product and its cost, you might have to identify the economic buyer, the user, the technical buyer, etc.
Steve Blank, entrepreneur, educator, and author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “The Start-up Owner’s Manual”, when speaking about B2B business customer interactions, recommends you start by talking with the middle management rather than the C-level executive.
This is because it is easier to do and allows you to gain experience before going to the C-suite.
Asking for Advice
Start-up founders and young entrepreneurs I’ve met are often inexperienced with the customer development process and intimidated by approaching customers.
Surprisingly, in my experience, a relevant number of customers are willing to help.
If you are working on a topic that interests customers and you solve a real problem, people are more open to talking.
As a general rule, you should approach them as a young scientific entrepreneur searching for advice.
You can have an extra advantage if you are an academic researcher, or you are affiliated in some way with a well-known academic institution.
Generally, asking for advice will help you get access because even doctors love being asked.
In fact, customers feel important when someone asks them for advice as they feel annoyed when a stranger asks for help or tries to sell something.
Therefore, do not use the word help and be clear that you are not trying to sell anything but hoping to have a short conversation with an expert.
If you are a researcher, you can also offer an additional incentive by sharing the results of your research with your potential customers and asking for their opinion.
Conclusion
I strongly believe that customer interactions are fundamental in every new product development. If you’ve been doing it wrong, I hope you found the tips I’ve just shared helpful.
In my next post, I will share practical real-life examples of how to find customers to talk to.
So, stay tuned and subscribe to avoid missing the second part.