The Nitty Gritty of Setting Up Customer Discovery Meetings
Editor’s note: The 2015 Lean Startup Conference is just around the corner (it’s from November 16-19th in San Francisco, and there’s still time to get your ticket!) We have dozens of excellent speakers and mentors who are eager to share their product development, entrepreneurship, and innovation stories–you’ll never see these experts all in one place ever again. Learn more about them in our ‘Lean Startup Speakers’ series.
Next up is David Telleen-Lawton, of UC Santa Barbara’s Technology Management Program . He’ll be giving a talk on Customer Discover Meetings at the 2015 Lean Startup Conference. Learn more about him here.
Through the years – and I’m talking since the early 1990s before we called it Lean Startup– I’ve found that the single most likely reason that the Customer Discovery process does not work is that the Customer Discovery meetings never get set up! That’s right. The book is read, the process embraced, excitement is shared, but in the end very few meetings actually take place.
Think of your own situation. If you have no problems getting in front of prospective customers and you are quickly learning about your business model, then I award you a free pass and can attend a different talk at the same time. However… if you are like most, your lack of setting as many meetings as you need — as timely as you need them — is preventing you from identifying a sustainable business model. I can change that for you!
And I’m NOT talking about some gimmick or some amazing list of prospects that I have in my hip pocket. I’m talking about molding your mindset, showing you skills and techniques, and detailing the standard of performance you can use to measure yourself.
RARELY is the problem of not getting meetings a result of prospective customers of your product or service not being interested. Instead, it’s mostly because you, the entrepreneur, are very clever about finding ways to delay putting in the effort to set up the meetings! You’re rational (most of the time). There’s reason behind your stalling. We’ll discuss that dark side and vanquish it so you can discover your business model and create your version 1 offering more quickly.
In my talk, I’m going to address this single weak link that I’ve observed across the decades, across industries, across product types. I will explain the nitty, the gritty, the details on how to set up Customer Discovery Meetings … the proper mindset, the proper skills and techniques, and the standard of performance that will turn you into a meeting-set-up machine.
I’ll help you get over the procrastination speed bump by surprising you with how simple your task becomes once you know the standard of performance and a few skills and techniques that I have identified from over one thousand calls into the highest level of target organizations (oops, I let one key techniques slip out there…more when you join me Wednesday afternoon!).
I’ll also make sure we have time to discuss four Customer Discovery Truths that are so often misinterpreted that they actually slow down your learning process. And there will be time for Q&A about your particular unique situation.
I look forward to having you join me and get you on the fastest path to revenue.