ARE YOU REALLY DOING THAT GREAT?

Let's say you run a business that's doing great. Or you're building one that you hope will be doing great.

You may have great technologies, a sound business model, strong products in high demand, a solid customer base, mega-trends on your back, a competent team, enviable margins, profitability and growths.

But unless and until you understand how your customers use your product, at which point in their process, and why, you won't be sure whether your customer will buy from you, or whether you’ll land that next customer, tomorrow. Why?

Because without such understanding, you aren't likely to have built a product that meets and anticipates the core needs of your customer. Sooner or later your customer will discover that they'd do just fine with less of or without your product, or a competitor's product suits them better. The customer may improve or change their process that requires less or none of your product. Without such understanding, you won't likely see it coming, let alone respond.

You've been busy building your "great technologies"and "strong products." But your customer doesn't care. They've been busy building theirs. They need help, for sure, but what you offer with your "great and strong" technologies and products may not provide all the help, all the time.

The degree or amount of help your product provides to your customers is the value of your product. The value of your product translates almost directly to the value of your business. Before you have a firm handle on the value you offer, your customer base may not be as solid, your business model may not be as sound, and is that great performance really sustainable or even that great to begin with?

"But that's elementary," you may say, "everybody knows that they need to help their customers, and of course we know how our products help ours!"

Unfortunately, we have seen plenty of businesses, high-flying unicorns and industry leaders alike, who could not answer a simple question "why does your customer use your product and how?" in a substantive way. Too often we hear generic statements like "we improve our customer's productivity", or laundry lists of product features packaged as "value propositions." That's insufficient, not enough to guide your product, or your business.

You must understand your customers like they do themselves: you must think like them, analyze like them, plan like them, feel like them; you must understand their customers, their field, their market like they do themselves. Such understanding must be logical, detailed, quantitative, and not statistics, big-data quantitative but "mechanism", "physics", "mathematical" quantitative, and it must include technical, operational, economic, financial and management aspects. You must understand your customer to the point where you're able to "act in their role" and make decisions that are best for them. And that understanding must always be up-to-date.

If you achieve that, you will know what to develop, what to build and how to sell and at what cost.

Your understanding must be sufficient to define your entire development, build and marketing cycles. It must provide the "first principles" from which every strategic and tactical decision is made. From there you can organize your entire business around creating and delivering your value to the customer and the marketplace.

At Elate, we have developed, perfected and practiced a full business system based on the above simple premise. It is complete with suites of expertise, processes, tools, methodologies, quantitative models, designs, assessments, procedures and best practices. We use it and we help clients use it, to vastly improve the performance of startups and industry leaders alike, create and build successful businesses from the ground up, and even create billion-dollar new market segments in mature industries.