Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 2nd Edition

STEP 13Map the Process to Acquire a Paying Customer

In This Step, You Will:

• Map out the decision‐making process (DMP) or, more precisely, the process by which your customer acquires your product.
• Build a first‐draft sales funnel.
• Estimate the sales cycle for your product.

After knowing who will make the decision, it is critical to know how they will make the decision.

Why This Step, and Why Now?

In Step 12, Determine the Customer's Decision‐Making Unit (DMU), you built a structure to make clear who makes the decision to acquire your product. Now you have to build a similar structure to make clear how they make a decision to acquire your product. The how is the process by which you convert a potential customer into a paying customer, and from initial contact to final payment. This is much more complicated than asking your champion to pressure your primary economic buyer.

This information will be a prerequisite to analyzing and choosing the appropriate business model to capture some of the value you are providing (Step 15, Design a Business Model), setting the Pricing Framework (Step 16), and estimating the value of a new customer (Step 17, Lifetime Value). In this step you will also determine the key factors in the sales cycle such that you have the information you ...