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 they do, 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. Your customer they soon may discover that they'd do just fine with less of or even without your product, or a competitor's product suits them better. They may improve their process reducing or eliminating the need for 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 only provide part of that help.

The degree or amount of help your product provides to your customers is the value of your product, which is the essence of the value of your business. Before you have a firm handle on that, your customer base may not be as solid as you think, your business model may not be as sound as it can be, 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!"

Sadly, we have seen plenty of businesses, from high-flying unicorns and industry leaders, who could not answer a simple question:

"WHY DOES YOUR CUSTOMER USE YOUR PRODUCT AND HOW DO THEY USE IT?"

Too many businesses could not answer this simple question in a substantive way. Too often we hear generic statements like "we improve customer's productivity", or laundry list of product features packaged as "value propositions." That's not enough for your business to really do great.

You must understand your customers like you are them: 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 or even better. Such understanding is likely detailed, quantitative (and not statistics, big-data quantitative but "mechanism", "physics", "mathematical" quantitative), and includes technical, operational, economic, financial and management aspects. You must be at a point where you're able to "act in their role" to make informed decisions about what they need at what cost. And that understanding has to be up-to-date. Then you'd know what to develop, what to build and how to sell and at a cost that maximizes your profitability.

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

The ELATE CUSTOMER-FOCUSED BUSINESS SYSTEM

At Elate, we have developed, perfected and practiced a full business system based on the above simple premise, which includes:

- Value Discovery that allows you to gain, refine, validate and stay up-to-date on the "mechanism-level" customer understanding described above.
- Value Creation that guides you from the value discovered technology development and product building.
- Value Delivery for your go-to-market, marketing and sales, and from there:
- Value Realization that organizes the entire business and organization around the value discovered, created and delivered.

We call it the Elate Customer-Focused Business System. It is complete with suites of expertise, processes, tools, methodologies, quantitative models, designs, assessments, procedures and best practices. We have used portions or the entirety of this system 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.