Innovation Process

Market Access

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 LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Understand on full life cycle use case and high-level product specification.
• Quantify the value proposition.
• Define your core competencies.
• Chart your competitive position.
• Profile target customers using Persona concept.
• Determine the Customer’s Decision–Making Unit (DMU).
• Map the process to acquire a paying customer.
• Map the sales process to acquire a customer.

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 What can you do for your customer?

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 What can you do for your customer?

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 What can you do for your customer?

• Build a full life cycle use case for the customer by describing how the product fits into
customer’s life. Important questions to be answered when building a full life cycle use
case are:

– How will the customer determine the need for your product?
– How will the customer find out about your product?
– How will he acquire your product?
– How will he use the product, perceive value and receive support?
– How will he pay for the product?
– How will he spread awareness about the product?
– What are the barriers for adoption?

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 Highlight the differences between
your personas

Use a customer journey map template to help create each persona

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 High-level visual specification

• Next, create a high-level visual specification for your product.

• This helps gain consensus about the product and remove any misunderstandings.

• It is by no means final; it acts as a baseline on which the team can iterate and refine.

• Create a summary/brochure by listing out features of the product and their benefits.

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 Quantify the value
• The customers get from your product.
• Value generally falls into better, cheaper, faster categories.
• It can be quantified by comparing the as-is and to-be states.

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 Validate the assumptions

• At this point of time, you have to connect with top 10 customers in your beachhead market
and validate the assumptions you have made, be it with respect to purchasing priorities, needs,
value propositions etc.
• Analyse and figure out how you would be able to deliver the product/solution compared to that of
anyone else.
• This could be cost, customer service, engineering, user experience, sales strategy etc.,
• This is something you have capability for/can invest in to differentiate from competitors.
• This is your moat, your core and cannot be replicated easily.
• This is your best bet against competition.
• However, this is not the reason your customers buy from you, it only helps you build a better
competitive position.

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 Competitive positioning
• How customers perceive your product in their minds with reference to the existing ones in the
market.
• In a positioning chart, you will show how well you fulfill customers top purchasing priorities versus
your competitor.

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 Steps to Chart Competitive Positioning

• Step 1: Know Your Customer

• Step 2: Select Chart Axes

• Step 3: Product/Service Competitor

• Step 4: Market Competitor

• Step 5: Positioning

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 Coffee Companies

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 Identify the Next 10 Customers
• Explicitly identifying the next 10 customers after the Persona increases your level of confidence that
you are on the right path and may also help you refine earlier steps.
• Disciplined Entrepreneurship is a systematic and rigorous 24 step to build new innovation-based
ventures. Source to be referred; https://www.d-eship.com/en/framework/

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 Identify & Validate
• Identify at least 10 potential customers, besides your Persona, who fit the End User Profile.
• Contact them to validate their similarity to your Persona, and their willingness to buy your product.

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 Identify Potential Customers
• While it is important to identify and develop a Persona to represent your end users, you must also be
sure to identify other potential customers to ensure your product's success.
• This will dramatically increase your confidence that you have identified a scalable opportunity, not
just a one-customer solution, as well as your credibility.

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company's ability

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 How does your customer acquire your product?

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 How does your customer acquire your product?
Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

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• To successfully sell a product to a customer, you need to understand who makes the
purchase decision and who influences the decision.
• Key questions to be answered are:
– What are the different stages customer go through before he/she decides to purchase your
product? Example — Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action.
– Who are the key players involved in each phase?
– How can they be reached out to and influenced?
– How long does the customer take to go through each phase?
– What does it cost to acquire the customer?
– What are the hidden barriers that limit your ability to sell the product and get paid?

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• Pharma giant, Merck’s most important customers are not the patients who use its drugs or the
physicians who prescribe them.

• Instead, Merck has chosen research scientists in labs and universities around the world as its primary
customer.

• Accordingly, its business model relies on encouraging its own world-class researchers to act like
university scientists by conducting basic research, publishing papers, and presenting results at
conferences, all with the intent of discovering ground-breaking compounds that can then be
commercialised by Merck’s marketing and sales group.

• Choosing the Right Customer. Source to be referred; https://hbr.org/2014/03/choosing-the-right-

customer

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• Google focused on users who appreciated technology and its ability to unlock new opportunities and
applications.

• Like Merck, Google allocated the lion’s share of its resources (and prestige) to its technologists and
engineers, who were given freedom to innovate.

• The aim throughout the business was to build the best technology in the world—whether in search,
Android, or maps.

• Choosing the Right Customer. Source to be referred; https://hbr.org/2014/03/choosing-the-right-

customer

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• This phase includes all the activities you undertake to Go-to-market (GTM).

• To improve the effectiveness of this phase, stay focused on the beachhead market and don’t get
distracted by prospects outside the target market. This will improve quality of leads and conversion
rates through word-of-mouth.

• A GTM strategy is the way in which a company brings a product to market. It’s a handy roadmap
that measures the viability of a solution's success and predicts its performance based on market
researches, prior examples, and competitive data.

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 The 4 Components of a GTM Strategy

• Product-market fit: What problem(s) does your product solve?

• Target audience: Who is experiencing the problem that your product solves? How much are they
willing to pay for a solution? What are the pain points and frustrations that you can alleviate?

• Competition and demand: Who already offers what you’re launching? Is there demand for the
product, or is the market oversaturated?

• Distribution: Through what mediums will you sell the product or service? A website, an app, or a
third-party distributor?

• The Proven Process for Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy [+Templates]. Source to be referred;
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/gtm-strategy

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Determine The Customer’s Decision-Making Unit (DMU)

• In order to understand the customer acquisition process, first you need to clearly identify the key
people who are involved in making the decision to purchase your product and sources of information
involved.

• Once you understand who is involved in Decision-Making Unit (DMU), then you can look at how to
acquire a paying customer.

• The 3 main roles in the DMU are:

― End User
― Primary Economic Buyer
― Champion: The person who gets the process going and keeps it going until it is concluded.

• The influencers can be sources of information such as Consumer Reports, etc.

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• Your target customer almost surely has a decision-making group of more than one person.

• Understanding this group and explicitly mapping out each person's role and interest is of critical
importance not just for the sale, but also much earlier in the process when you are developing the
product and all its attributes.

• Learn who makes the ultimate decision to purchase your product, and who will be advocating for
purchasing it.

• Meet the influencers who have the sway over the purchasing decision.

• Learn who makes the ultimate decision to purchase your product, and who will be advocating for
purchasing it

• Meet the influencers who have the sway over the purchasing decision.

• The DMU for each customer should be similar.

•ModuleIfCode
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notTitle: Your customer do not match the Persona
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or You have not segmented your market enough
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 Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

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 Map The Customer Acquisition Process
Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

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• Map the process by which a customer decides to purchase your product.
• Estimate the sales cycle of your product.
• Identify any hurdles – budgets , compliance etc. that would slow down your ability to sell your
product.

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 Use the Full Life Cycle Use Case as a basis

• How customers will determine they have a need and/or opportunity to move away from
their status quo & how to activate customers to feel they have to do something
different;

– How they will find out about your product

– How they will analyse your product
– How they will acquire their product
– How customers will install your product
– How customers will pay for your product
– Time is of essence - to ensure you put a timeline into all this
– Also limits on your buyers – limits of purchase value – how far it needs to go up

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 Map The Sales Process to Acquire A Customer
Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

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• In this step you must develop short-term, medium-term and long-term sales strategies for your
product.
• Mapping the sales process is a thoughtful first pass at how you will enter the market, refine your sales
strategy over time, and establish long term strategy for customer acquisition.
• The sales process include includes creating awareness, educating the customer and handling and
processing the sale.

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 Fundamental & Important Concept

Windows of Opportunity (WoO) Triggers

• A time when your target end user, economic • Within the WoO, a specific action you take to
buyer, champion, or influencer will be create an urgency/strong incentive for the
particularly open to considering your offering; target customer to act;

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 You need a well-designed trigger

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• Know your Windows of Opportunity and take advantage of them with well-designed Triggers, timing is
crucial!

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 Acquire a Paying Customer
• The Process to Acquire a Paying Customer is the foundation of your sales process, but you must
understand that your customers are not equally predisposed to buying your product regardless of
when you start the sales process.
• Knowing when your customer is most open to the elements of the acquisition process is an important
consideration in effectively and efficiently executing your sales funnel to a successful conclusion.

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 A Window of Opportunity (WoO)

• Time period in which your target end user, your economic buyer, and/or your champion
will be particularly open to considering purchasing your product. Examples of common
WoO include:

– Seasonality (selling lemonade in summer and Christmas wreaths in winter)

– Crisis (e.g., blackout, security breach) or impending potential crisis (e.g., forecast for a storm,
the potential Y2K computer bug)
– End of fiscal year (extremely relevant for business, but also for some consumers due to taxes)
– Budget planning cycle
– Life transitions (e.g., graduation, first job, first home, pregnancy)
– Change in leadership (e.g., company hires a new chief information officer)
– Change in regulation (e.g., enactment of the Affordable Care Act)
– Searching the Internet and finding your product
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