- Part 1 – Find out who has the problem you’re trying to solve
- Part 2 – Find out what they don’t like about their current solutions
- Part 3 – Tools of the Trade: Information Flow and Cycle
- Part 4 – The Single Best Method for Creating Insights
- Part 5 – Market Validation: How it all comes together
B2B marketing is an ever-changing world. Corporations must keep up with the constant flux of industry demands, consumer behavior, and competitive trends. One of the best ways to accomplish sustained, organic growth in B2B is by strengthening your company’s approach to both customer discovery and market validation. That is, determine if you’re solving a problem people know they have, and if you can do it better than anyone else. But how do you know if your solution is, “Better?”
Both customer discovery and market validation need to be informed by research-based innovation and accurate insight into customer needs. There can be no compromise here – effective customer discovery methods will allow you to tailor your product development to consumers’ exact demands and remain ahead of the curve. It also solves many of your eventual marketing problems along the way by highlighting what you solve, how you solve it, and why your solution is better than anything else out there.
This approach also ensures you don’t waste time and money working on expensive moonshots. So called, “transformational innovation.” Moonshots are excellent, but nobody launches a rocket to the moon without some serious research and planning. So then why launch a world changing product without first determining if anyone wants it?
Using market validation along with this will further cement any information gathered through customer discovery, allowing you to test product concepts before investing in them.
Our next post will be Part 3, providing you with a few of the most reliable methods of feedback and market innovation based on the insights you can gain using tried-and-true customer discovery practices.
