Friendly first contacts

Goal

Develop a customer list and schedule the first customer contacts

Checklist

• Make a list of 50 customers to test your ideas on
  • You are less interested in brand names than you are in who will give you the time
  • Don't be a little snob
  • You want to spend time on those people you think fit your hypothesis of user profile
• Get leads of who to call from:
  • Investors
  • Founders
  • Lawyers
  • Headhunters
  • Trade magazines
  • Business Reference Books
• Begin to develop an innovators list. Ask others who are the most innovative
  • Company
  • Department in a company
  • Individuals
• Create an introductory email:
  • One paragraph company introduction
  • Have people who gave you the leads, send the email
  • Follow up with a call
  • 50 follow up phone calls should yield 5-10 visits.
• Create a reference story / sales script (why are you calling / emailing)
  • Focus on the solution / not the features
  • What problems are you trying to solve?
  • Why is it important to solve them?
  • Don't try to sell anything but just ask for the time to understand how the company works
  • Give them a reason to see you: what's in it for them?
• Ten phone calls or emails a day
  • Call / Email until you are booked with 3 customer visits a day
  • Get used to being turned down but always ask: "If you are too busy: who should i talk to?"
  • For this first meeting you are "level-insensitive"; you don't care about titles, you just want to gather data.
  • Keep hit rate statistics (any pitch, leads or level better or worse than others)
  • Log all contacts in a database with enough detail about the call.

Exit deliverables

• Reference story and 5 to 10 customer visits scheduled

Part of: Customer Development Checklist - Customer Discovery Part of book: The Four Steps to the Epiphany