Quick! What’s the leading cause of start-up failures in America?
If you said “lack of funding,” you’d be wrong.
A report, compiled and published by CB Insights, ranked all the reasons startup founders gave for their failures (aka: post-mortems). Their number one reason: customers didn’t really need their products.
Be Media Savvy hosted its first quarterly Mastermind and marketing workshop last weekend (the next one will be in June). We began the process by focusing on the most important person in our clients’ organizations, the customer.
Why start with the customer?
The evidence is clear from 200+ entrepreneurs who have written essays on why their new ventures failed. Great ideas with no real-world usefulness are the first startups to fail. Consumers cannot get behind them.
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” ~ Seth Godin
All the advertising budgets, inbound marketing strategies, and social media engagement in the world cannot overcome the one fatal flaw of “nobody wanting to buy your stuff.” That is the Fire-Aim-Ready-Fail method, and it’s prohibitively costly.
If you’re reading marketing blogs because you have a new idea you want to sell, or your current idea is not selling well, take a step back and ask yourself:
“What practical solution does my customer really need to solve a real problem?”
Make it your purpose to fulfill your customer’s desire for something. (security, validation, prestige, acclaim, knowledge, happiness, prosperity) And then set about to knock down the barriers and obstacles that stand in their way.
“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”
~ JFK
When you understand that your purpose is to fulfill your customers’ desires, and your direction always leads back to meeting your customers’ needs, you have the foundation for a successful business. Proceed with great effort and courage, because you are in the Ready-Aim-Fire-Succeed frame of mind.
This simple shift in your thinking will send ripples of efficiency throughout your business operation. It will positively affect your company culture – see my last blog about Cinderella – and it will make your marketing and advertising budget stretch farther.
“How?” you ask.
Consider the Prince with the glass slipper. He knew he wanted the girl who fit the shoe, but he didn’t know how to find her. His solution was to travel far and wide with a slipper, a shoe horn and a sliver of hope.
The modern equivalent is investing huge budgets into advertising or asking for “anybody and everybody” referrals at networking events. That shows courage and effort, but it’s cost-prohibitive for most small businesses, because it lacks a clear direction.
Had the Prince been savvy enough to get Cinderella’s contact information before midnight, he could have saved the Crown a boat-load of travel expenses!
The modern equivalent is targeted marketing and advertising (built upon a well-defined avatar/audience) that invites engagement and nurtures a relationship between you and your customer.
Stop wasting precious resources with the Fire-Aim-Ready approach. It loses too many arrows and misses too many opportunities. If you want your business to grow in 2017, contemplate your customers, their desires, and their obstacles to find your purpose and direction.
