CHAPTER 9Customer Validation, Phase One: “Get Ready to Sell”
PHASE 1 OF CUSTOMER VALIDATION PREPARES the tools to test the company’s ability to acquire customers. In this phase, you’ll craft your product positioning, which guides how you write the marketing, and online materials needed for the sales effort. For companies in the physical channel, other steps in this phase include development of collateral materials, channel sales plans, and a sales roadmap. Sometimes, a “sales closer” is also hired at this point. And you’ll finalize your advisory board.
Web/mobile channel startups develop their plans and tools for customer acquisition and activation as well as a dashboard or toolset for monitoring the results. They create a hi-fidelity MVP to be sure the acquisition efforts are valid.
Steps in this first phase are markedly different for each channel, so physical and web/mobile channels are addressed separately, as outlined in Figure 9.1.
When all these steps are in place, it’s time to get out of the building and start selling, in Phase 2. Here are the steps each channel requires before you are ready to sell.
Figure 9.1 Phase 1 – Get Ready to Sell
Get Ready to Sell: Craft ...
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