The One-Hour Business Plan: The Simple and Practical Way to Start Anything New

Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You'd be amazed how many companies don't listen to their customers.

—Ross Perot, American presidential candidate and founder of Electronic Data Systems

 

Module 2

Who Are You Offering To? The Customer Target Market

The Only Sustainable Source of Business Funding for the Long Term

 

Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.

—Stanley Marcus, former Chairman of luxury retailer Neiman Marcus

Customer Target Market Introduction

An innovation needs to be attached to a customer. Without sufficient customers at a specific value, nothing else matters. Some of the most comprehensive detailed business plans I have seen identified a market only to find the market in question insufficient to sustain the business model. The reason the customer target market module comes next (see Figure 2.1) is to help you assess whether your offering has sufficient value for customers by testing it with them first. This justifies the economic purpose of most business models, which is to make money.

Figure 2.1 The One-Hour Business Plan™ Foundation—Five Essential Business Plan Cornerstones

In this module, we go through a series of steps to help you develop an initial customer list to approach to get answers to such critical questions as: How much are they willing to pay? How often do they purchase in a year? What is the sales cycle time? The size of ...