So how did we select the winners from our slate of pilots? We didn't even have the luxury of producing as many pilots as the broadcast networks produced. We simply didn't have the money for that. We had to iterate along the way, hoping we'd attract an initial audience and build on the characters and stories the audience seemed to like most. Importantly, we had to rely on the type of show our audience came to our network for: mostly action hours with characters that could be heroes or villains, but were ones viewers were anxious to follow.
So what have our entrepreneurs learned about taking a product to market? In her article, "Liking vs. Buying: How Strong Is Demand for Your Product?" Jen Baird will provide insight on how to test the robustness of what you're offering.
Product has to move to market through the channels that can deliver to your intended market. For software and digital products that can move around the globe at the speed of the Internet, the entry point offers few barriers to getting up and in operation. But for products that are tangible, that actually have to be delivered through distribution channels owned by others, the challenges and barriers to entry can be significant. One entrepreneur, Sarah Endline, founder of chocolate company sweetriot, shares some the challenges and offers a road map to successful channel access in "How to Move Your Product to Market: Sweet Advice from Sweetriot."
How do you protect your product? Is it something that you should patent, copyright or trademark, and what does that mean for the future of your business? Does this protect your product from being stolen by others? Does it really produce a barrier to entry for your competitors? How will you know when you should take the step to protect your IP? Kelly Fitzsimmons offers advice from her own experience in her article "Ten Ways to Protect Your Intellectual Property."
In the end, products, whether digital or tangible, need to fulfill a user's pain points or fulfill their desire to have it. This is the challenge of every entrepreneur-to fill a need or create a desire to own or use the products we offer. Be mindful of everything already serving your intended market. Make sure you are adding something unique, offering some improvement or bringing something disruptive that will change a marketplace. Then protect it from competition to the best of your ability and execute, execute, execute.
Liking vs. Buying: How Strong Is Demand for Your Product?
Jen Baird
Customers may say you have a great idea for a product-but how can you tell if they will actually buy it?
One of the trickiest things about starting a company is getting an accurate read on demand. When sailors need help figuring out which way the winds are blowing, they rely on telltales-strips of fabric that flutter from the rigging. Here's how entrepreneurs can read the telltales specific to their businesses.
Is there a wind at all?
Entrepreneurs are constantly exhorted to talk to customers, and potential customers, to define a market need. Yet figuring out the best way to do that is often quite a puzzle! The first key is to focus on the potential customers' point(s) of pain: What can't they do that they need to? Why not? What is the impact?
Don't ask your would-be customers how they would solve their problems. Instead, try to thoroughly understand their pain points, and then use your expertise to invent a novel solution. Our target customers were immunology researchers. They desperately needed access to a tool called a flow cytometer or they couldn't do their research. However, the instruments available were far too expensive for most individual lab budgets. Trying to use a flow cytometer owned by a shared lab was fraught with expense and problems. It was an opportunity in the making: massive pain affecting the core of immunologists' careers, every day. The solution? A powerful, easy-to-use, affordable flow cytometer.
Is it a strong wind, or just a breeze?
Once you have identified a problem, you must test how big a deal it is. The problem the innovator seeks must be big enough and irritating enough to support your business, and something critical to the success of your potential customer. To figure out if you are dealing with a strong wind or just a breeze, look for strong positive reactions from your potential customers. For us, the telltales that we had a strong opportunity were reactions such as, "Oh, you have got to do this! How can I help?" "Please, please don't leave me out!" and "How soon can I get one?" If the reaction is, "That sounds nice," then your wind isn't strong enough.
Is it a good wind?
A strong value proposition will be essential to your future sales. Find the root causes of the customer's pain so you can understand the consequences and potential benefits of solving their problem.
Finding a robust market opportunity requires creative reading of the market winds. The strong winds are those that inspire potential customers to help you and keep in touch, so they can be first in line when your product is ready. Those are the opportunities that will open pocketbooks.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Figure out whether your good idea for a service or product provides a solution for your target customers that they are willing to pay for.
Test your idea out to make sure people really want it and are excited about it and that the price for your solution to relieve their pain is worth it to them.
Understand the reasons and benefits of your solution. This will help your marketing and sales.
How to Move Your Product to Market: Sweet Advice from Sweetriot
Sarah Endline
Find the product's soul, build a great team and then radiate out to the marketplace.
I have said since the beginning at sweetriot that nothing matters until you have the inside right first. For us this means two things: a fantastic team and an innovative product. In the consumer world, you can't go to market until you have this. Sales and marketing will be core of everything you do.
So first, hire right. Your salespeople represent the brand in everything you do. In any movement, they should look and feel your identity and carry the spirit. Second, it is no fun selling an inferior product, so make sure yours is a cut above. Until it is, don't launch. Enter when ready and iterate whenever necessary. I can remember an early retailer being brutally honest, and we made changes (albeit small ones) for our customers.
Once you have the team and product, it's time to "radiate to the marketplace." I think of this as having the soul right first, so you can radiate outside in an authentic manner.
So onward we go. The most important thing is to first develop a distribution strategy. This means thinking through where you want your product sold, and at what speed you want to land on retail shelves. I also ask, "Why these channels?" as it's important to think about your lead consumers. Where are they shopping and what distribution channel will reach them?
In the national organic world, many start with natural specialty stores and then slowly make their way to the leader, Whole Foods. A natural move after the natural specialty world is more regional grocery chains, such as Wegmans or Sprouts. Then you may move to national grocery chains like Safeway or Kroger.
There are other channels to consider, but this depends entirely on the type of product you have. Convenience stores (7-Eleven), drug stores (Walgreens), club stores (Costco) and mass stores (Target, Walmart) are all key players. One of the best ways to determine the proper rollout is to study those in your direct category, meaning food vs. housewares vs. beauty, etc. The Internet continues to grow as a viable channel and gives you fantastic control of the customer experience as well.
Once you have your distribution targets in mind, it's time to sell your product. As you have the right team and product in place, this may be easier than you think. You find the owners or buyers of the appropriate players and contact them. Some buy on a daily basis while others may have review periods during the year if they are larger players. These review periods are dependent on your category and tend to fluctuate. Visiting stores and customers face-to-face has been our key to closing sales-showing up with a truly passionate team and product makes a huge difference.
We have also learned that it is the "after sale" work in retail that is more challenging.
As you build out your distribution, you will need to support your product at the retail level. Promote, promote, promote. In the case of food, sampling is a core promotional strategy. This can be done in-store at demos or at outside events. Your goal is to reach your lead consumer and to convert to sales.
Another popular strategy for reaching your consumers is price promotions. Especially in a value-conscious economic environment, this is even more important. Promotions drive consumer trial.
While checking in stores, don't forget to check your shelf position and merchandising. It does matter where you are on the shelf, and it matters how many places you show up in the store.
Lastly, you want buzz, word of mouth, press and ongoing social media energy around your company and products. This means that becoming active on social media is critical, as is engaging with the press so they share your story.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Get your product right. There is no point in marketing an inferior product.
Build the A team to develop the marketing and sales strategy.
Choose the target market for your ideal customer and start selling.
Five Tips for Getting to Product-Market Fit
Ellie Cachette
For many start-ups, finally getting to product-market fit seems like the Holy Grail. Here are five things to keep in mind along the way.
Every start-up chases that goal known as "product-market fit"-the semi-scientific point where a company or product reaches scalability. In our case, we had to chase down three different hypotheses before we found the one that led us to product-market fit. You can read more about our journey at slideshare.net/ecachette/journey-to-product-market-fit-16953581.
While you're working hard to find the right spot for your own product, or the right product for a market you know well, it's important to keep in mind the indicators of true product-market fit.
Business hypotheses
Make sure you're asking the right questions. For example: How much capital are you willing to dedicate per theory? That will set the tone for how you go about trying to find the right fit. Every great business starts with a business need or a solution to a problem.
Beware of false positives.
It's important to keep a neutral but open mind. It's easy to pounce on any evidence of activity as success, but first adopters are not always the best adopters.
For instance, in the beginning, a few customers may be willing to pay $100 a month for your service. But if there aren't enough of them (say, less than ten thousand) or if the expense to acquire a user is more than the amount you can charge them for three months of your service, you may not have a business model after all. It may actually be smarter to go after fewer larger clients or users.
Minimum viable product vs. minimum sellable product
If you're in the enterprise space, you may be able to sell a product that isn't built yet. But if you're going after consumers, you usually need to be able to present them with a minimum viable product.
The difficulty arises when you have a minimum product that works, but it isn't robust enough, or doesn't have enough features, for you to be able to charge for it. The question you might ask yourself is, "How far away are we from a chargeable or billable product?" If you don't know, ask potential users what they'd like to see you add, or get the opinions of those that passed.
Check your hypothesis.
How many days or weeks are you willing to spend collecting data? How long until you know you are successful? This is a refreshing framework to give yourself and your team. While some sales cycles are slow and can require months of hard work, ask yourself and your team how long you are willing to go before taking lessons learned and evolving the product.
Does your family use it or get it?
Would you use your own app? Even if it's corporate or enterprise driven? Would your aunt, mom or dad use it? If a family member doesn't use it, or can't understand it, you've got a problem. Either you're not properly communicating the value of what you're doing, or you're not solving a problem.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Achieving "product-market fit" is the goal for any start-up. It can be tricky finding the true indicators of reaching that point where you are certain you have a product that solves a problem that you can sell.
Check and recheck your hypotheses. Know how much capital you can spend per theory, and how much time you can spend collecting data.
You must have enough potential customers to support your model. If your family and friends wouldn't use it and can't understand it, there is a problem.
How to Compete on Value, Not Price
Sandra Wear
Use these three steps to get customers to look beyond price to see the value your company truly offers.
I always compete on value. I will not compete on price. If you follow these three basic rules, you can do it too.
There are lots of ways to create value. Value can come from tangible factors, such as the financial return a customer gets from using your product or service, or from intangible ones, such as image or brand equity. This holds true if you're selling a product to a customer, selling equity in your company, or even selling a job to a potential hire. The fundamentals are always the same: Sell value. Don't compete on price.
Here's how:
1. Make your target customer your best friend. Make your industry your inner circle.
To successfully compete on value, you need to know everything about your target customer and your market. That includes:
Who will be using your product or service?
How will they be using it?
What product or service will you be replacing?
How does your prospect make buying decisions?
What pain points does your prospect need to be addressed?
What does your prospect think about your competitors and their offerings?
How does the competition promote, price and sell its product or service?
Here's how you'll build this knowledge base:
Read research, recent articles or posts quoting key executives on issues or challenges.
Read press releases and annual reports from your target customers and others in their market.
Attend events where your prospects, customers or other market players are speaking.
Be diligent about recording information, analyzing patterns and identifying opportunities, so you can discuss them with your customers and prospects.
Yes, this is a lot of work. But the payoff can be tremendous.
2. Communicate a compelling promise that is benefit-driven.
Everyone in your organization should know the value promise. Notice I say "value promise," not "value proposition." Everyone has a value proposition, but no one does anything about it. Making a "value promise" will help focus your thinking and delivery. The promise needs to be consistently communicated in everything your company does, from marketing materials to culture to user experience.
At our company, the research described above led us to develop a simple ZigBee network setup tool. The product we developed came in two parts: a comprehensive web platform for the network manager and a simple desktop solution that offered clients a virtually automated solution for network setup. Then we changed our messaging. We were no longer selling a comprehensive solution. Instead, we promised a "1-2-3" solution for easy setup.
In making these changes, we built on our brand values of uniqueness and excellence. We established our uniqueness with our products (simple, visual rather than text-heavy, and automated), our vision (a single and standard way to control networks) and even our hiring and retention practices.
3. Deliver what you promise. If you don't, fix it.
Check in with your customers. Are they getting what you promised? If there are gaps, fix them. In another company I founded, we'd promised that our product would save clients money by reducing missed deadlines and courier costs. One particular Fortune 50 client had deployed the solution globally. They were saving money on deadlines and courier costs-but they had larger IT costs. We showed the client how we could host the software for them, bringing their IT costs back down.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Whether you are pitching to a customer, an investor or a potential boss, sell value, not price.
Identify prospects, what problems they are trying to solve and what motivates their buying decisions; get to know their point of view.
Do your homework and figure out how you can position yourself above the competition.
Promise solutions and then build your brand around the promises. Deliver on these promises and make sure your stakeholders agree you are doing so.
Ten Ways to Protect Your Intellectual Property
Kelly Fitzsimmons
Companies like Facebook and Twitter show that intellectual property isn't the must-have it once was. So why are Google, Apple and Microsoft spending billions on it?
How important is intellectual property protection to your start-up? Not too long ago, defensible IP was one of the top things venture capitalists wanted to see in a start-up. But the success of several high-profile tech start-ups, such as Twitter and Facebook, that are relatively weak on patentable intellectual property, has caused many to rethink that assumption. After all, creating and maintaining a robust IP portfolio is expensive. Patents don't determine whether a start-up will be able to scale. And the lean start-up model is all about getting to market fast with the minimum viable product. Launch first, patent later… if at all.
But every start-up-lean or not-needs to plan for success. If your start-up starts to scale quickly, a strong IP portfolio will be vitally important to your ability to play the long game. The world's largest innovators, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, seem to agree. During the first months of 2012, these companies spent more than $18 billion on intellectual property in the voice space alone. They're investing top dollar to ensure that their corporate IP portfolios are diverse, rich in innovation and allow them to hedge against many possible futures.
So what should start-ups do to protect their IP assets?
Patent what is important to others, not just you.
Make time to get smart on intellectual property. Educate yourself and your team on the basics of trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets. Investing a day or two early on will save headaches later.
Reduce costs by doing your own IP searches first. Start with a Google patent search (google.com/patents).
Work with an attorney who specializes in intellectual property and ask for a fixed rate to file.
Save money by working with a patent attorney from a different geography. Ivy League lawyers in Wisconsin are just as good as Ivy League lawyers in New York City. The cost savings may be upward of 50 percent.
Patents aren't your only asset. Conduct an audit to identify all your registered and unregistered trademarks and copyrights.
Invest in well-written nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Make sure your employment agreements, licenses, sales contracts and technology transfer agreements all protect your intellectual property too, right from the get-go.
File as fast as you can. A patent application holds your place in line. You will have twelve months from that initial submission to expand upon your filing. And remember, U.S. patents can take more than five years to issue.
Investigate international patents if key competitors are outside the U.S. A U.S. patent will not protect you against competitors in Europe, never mind China.
Think hard about the future. From your vantage point, what does the future look like? Use this information to devise your patent strategy, and to figure out which of your work needs to be legally protected. From there, your patent applications should flow.
As President Lincoln once remarked, the patent system adds "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius." IP rights, which include patents, trademarks, trade secrets and copyrights-even the right URLs-play an essential role in monetizing innovation. If you make it easy for others to steal your ideas, you can ultimately end up washing away your own path to success.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Once launched, plan for the success of your company by building a strong IP portfolio, just like Google, Microsoft and Apple have.
Educate yourself and your team about intellectual property, including patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks; conduct audits and file patents fast and hire a good IP attorney from a less-expensive area.
Invest in well-written company documents including nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), technology transfers and employment agreements.
How to Measure Customer Love-and Increase Sales
Karen Moon
Have an awesome consumer product? Here are three underutilized tips to improve your sales pitch.
When you are scaling a consumer products company, scoring a large order with a retailer has obvious benefits. It helps you reach minimum orders, broadens brand exposure to consumers and serves as a marketing channel for your own website and stores.
In my past life as an investor, I have seen numerous consumer products pitches. However, rarely did I see entrepreneurs quantify how much customers loved their product and calibrate that demand.
My advice: Don't sell products-sell the opportunity. Incorporating consumer engagement data in your product sales pitch to retailers can paint the picture for the growth potential of your brand and thereby sales for your retail partners. Here's what you need to do to make this happen:
1. Utilize online consumer engagement to drive sales.
According to a recent DigitasLBi survey, 88 percent of consumers research products online even if they are making offline purchases. Whether you are selling to a retailer for its brick-and-mortar store or e-commerce channels, upward trends in your web metrics can improve your sales pitch.
At Trendalytics, we advise brands to leverage momentum of online traffic, search queries and social media engagement to strengthen their sales pitch to wholesale partners. Free tools to measure your growth and that of competitors include Compete, Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner.
2. Promote positive customer reviews and testimonials.
A few years ago, I invested in a quickly growing headphone company. The company's financial traction was strong, but I wanted to understand how consumers perceived the products to validate its potential to expand to more retail accounts. To do this, I analyzed online customer reviews and ratings.
First, I aggregated ratings for headphones on key e-commerce sites. With a few simple calculations, I was able to determine how this company fared relative to the market. Their average ratings were in line with the top four players, and the last three essentially had the same rankings. Additionally, five of this company's SKUs appeared on the top twenty-five best-selling headphone products for Best Buy. Furthermore, the other top-ranked brands offered products at significantly higher price points. The facts that this company had such strong consumer efficacy and filled a price-point gap in the market were compelling. I also mined the comments for reviews that illustrated which aspects of the product consumers loved.
This headphone company ended up being one of the firm's best investments because of the outside-the-box data I used. This type of data can enhance a sales pitch to new retailers and also to increase penetration.
3. Track how many times a story related to your product or company is shared.
Retailers love seeing press articles, as it is great validation for your product. Strengthen the validation you have by highlighting the number of times the articles were shared on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Seventy-one percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase on the basis of social-media referrals, so the fact that readers were passionate enough to share your story with their friends is worth touting. For print articles, mention the publisher's circulation stats to illustrate the potential reach of your PR campaigns.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Don't sell the product; sell customer engagement.
Promote positive customer reviews and testimonies.
Take particular note of this statement: "Track how many times a story related to your product is shared."
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源