Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 2nd Edition

STEP 12Determine the Customer's Decision‐Making Unit (DMU)

In This Step, You Will:

• Build a fundamental and systematic understanding of who makes the decision to acquire your product—including influencers.

Your target customer comprises three elements. They may be all in one person but more often it is more than one person. Understanding this situation is crucial.

Why This Step, and Why Now?

You are now getting confident that you can uniquely create value for our target customer. The question now is, can you get paid for this? This step starts that analysis. You begin with getting the foundational knowledge about the acquisition process. In later steps, you build on this to determine if you can make enough money to have a sustainable business (Steps 15–19).

Let's Get Started

At this point, you should have a good idea of who your target end user customer is and how you can uniquely create value for them. That being said, there will be no value created unless the customer acquires the product and uses it. As such, you turn your attention to the sales or customer acquisition process. Rarely is the sales process simple. In fact, it might be the most complicated part of the whole process discussed in this book.

When almost any product of significance is acquired and adopted ...