Are you trying to improve develop customer loyalty? This article is for lawyers and investors. It’s not written for people looking for legal services.
All startups need to mitigate business risk. The largest risk is if there is no market need.
These are very avoidable reasons. All you have to do is know your customer.
Many startups are killed in the early days by going after the wrong market. Also, many of them build the wrong product for the wrong customers.
After start-ups finally figure out the right market, they have run out of cash.
When you build products or services to solve your own problems, you understand the issue.
But there is only one of you. You need to make sure there are a lot of other customers out there. Once you build the company, you are not the customer.
You need to understand what your problem statement is. For example, you can see the problem that ClearWay Law solves below:
“We believe sole practitioners and small firms struggle with maximizing revenue because they are poor at marketing.”
Product Or Service To Develop Customer Loyalty
Marketplaces are great places for investment. But what makes it hard. You have two groups you need to focus on. There is the demand side and the supply side.
You often want to focus on the demand side first. You can often work on the supply later.
However, it’s harder with online marketplaces because you have to do customer development for two groups. Whatever one is the hardest to prove (buyer or seller) you should focus on.
Customer Development Survey Questions
Right now with COVID-19, there is a lot of uncertainty in the market. If you want to pitch to investors, they want to know about how you have mitigated business risk.
Every hour of research you do might save you 20 hours of time building the wrong thing. Alternatively, you might save time on going to the wrong tradeshows or sending emails to the wrong people.
The most important thing is to understand the problem and your companies unique value proposition.
If you have these things wrong, all your marketing, development, and sales will be off.
If you do don’t know what the problem is, you cannot solve it.
You need to know who you are targetting. When you start off, you have limited resources. You cannot go after every single person. When you are a start-up, your resources are extremely finite.
You might ask a potential customer “how do you deal with X today?”
There are no leading questions. They also shouldn’t be open-ended questions. You can’t say “What do you like about the product.”
This assumes they like the product. You might say “What do you like about the product if anything?”
Also, don’t ask what people want in the future. People simply don’t know. Instead, ask people about their current behaviour. Asking about the past might work if the people remember correctly.
Always ask why?
Happy Customers and Repeat Customers
If your operation is a freemium service, it might only take a day to sign people up. If you are selling upfront fee services, it might take months (or even a year.)
Are you wanting to sell to law firms? It might be important to focus on the largest law firms. If you get a few top law firms signed up, the middle-sized law firms will want the products. Once the mid-sized law firms sign up, the smaller law firms will want the products (if they can afford it.)
If a customer needs three years to sign up, it’s going to be hard. For some products, this is a reality. If you are wanting to sell a brand new technology system for a law firm with 20,000 lawyers, it’s going to take years. However, the payoff might be massive.
You want to be able to say X group of people experience Y problems. We are developing product Z which will solve problem Y for group X.
The value statement says that the group of people with the group will experience a unique solution by working with you. Are they early adopters? Or will it take them a year to sign up? If you are looking to raise capital, the investors are going to want to know this.
Customer Acquisition Using Customer Loyalty
There has to be a product-market fit. Most people already have a solution. You need to know the product you want to solve and for who. This needs to be done before you build anything.
Be mindful it should be the market-product fit, not product-market fit. You need to know the market before you build the product. Many companies get it the wrong way around.
You should write the press release for the product before you start building it. It only needs to be one page. If everything went the way you wanted, you can reverse engineer from there. If you start writing the press release and it doesn’t make sense, you should rethink your plan.
You also need to think about how to prove yourself wrong. Try to find the ways that you can fail. Imagine you were your competition and wanted your company to fail. Try and find evidence that would show that your company is likely to fail.
Just like in court, you need to think about what the other side is going to argue. It’s not possible to only focus on the points you want to make to the judge. You also need to think about what the opposing party is going to tell the judge. You then need to plan for how you are going to respond to their positions. Normally whoever is better prepared wins the case.
Companies that interview their customers often earn far more revenue than others. Trends change and customers change. Sending a customer survey isn’t as good as speaking to them. You need to speak to the customer instead of just sending a survey.
Existing Customers And Loyal Customers
When you are developing a product for the first time, you must do customer development work. If you can’t find someone to interview, then you can’t find someone to buy your product. You should use the same interview strategy that you would for a sales strategy.
The startup community can also provide feedback. Linkedin is also very helpful. You can reach out to people and explain you are not trying to sell anything. Say that you value their input, and see if they will speak to you for 10 minutes. It can be while they drink their car or are on the bus. Further, you can say that you really care about the problem, and you would like 5 minutes of their time. Sometimes you can even speak to VP’s or CEO of large companies.
You should plan 5-10 questions to ask them. You might only get through 3 of the questions, or 10 of them. It depends on how much time you have. Also, it depends on how deep they want to go on the questions.
ClearWay Law uses the company “Calendry” to do a booking for consultations. Therefore, people can pick the time that works for them. People who need legal services from a lawyer love picking the time.
Using Customer Service Develop Customer Loyalty
You need to understand what’s challenging with your business plan. You might say it’s hard to raise money from venture capitalists. It might be that there is a lack of funds going around right now. However, maybe the problem is that you don’t know how to create a compelling.
Companies like Casper had a leap of faith assumption that people would buy a bed mattress over the internet. There was no real data to support that people wanted this. Before, everyone would like to go into Sleep Country to try the mattress prior to buying.
Try and figure out what your leap of faith assumptions are.
Once you have a leap of faith assumption, you need to go out and do the planning.
ClearWay Law spends a lot of time trying to develop customer loyalty. Also, if you are a lawyer or investor and want to discuss ClearWay Law, feel free to reach out to us by filling out one of our forms.
If you have questions about how to develop customer loyalty at your law firm, reach out on Linkedin.
Author: Alistair Vigier is the CEO of ClearWay Law