BUSINESS 101 FOR TEENAGERS PART 3

In this article, we are going to talk about understanding you customers. At this stage of your business development, you are still trying to uncover the frustrations of your customers and learn everything you can about the problem. To do that, you will need to do a market research which allows you to gather insights about the needs and preferences of your potential customers. This helps you determine who your target customer is, what they need, and how to sell an offering to them. So, our discussion will focus on how to conduct interviews to determine your customer’s persona.

MARKET RESEARCH.

Now that you have a better sense of why starting with and focusing on the customer is important, lets go over how to assess their needs. There are a lot of ways to get input from customers. At this stage, you want to be uncovering potential needs. Often, entrepreneurs think they understand the customer need, so they create a solution, only to find out they were wrong. By focusing on customer frustrations, you can avoid this. Through interview and observations, you will get first hand accounts of real customer frustrations.

Interview and Observations

• First, you want to figure out who to interview and how to find them. You want people with different buying behaviors, for example, some people spend time making thoughtful decisions, while others shop impulsively.
• Next, write an interview guide. A few open-ended questions to learn about their needs and ideas. Leave room to make it a conversation, go out and take the interview and make sure you take good notes. While developing your interview guide, avoid bad interview questions, for example, do you like to travel? Would you use an app that replaces our personal trainer? etc. These types of questions are too leading and don’t take advantage of the value of being able to talk to with the customer. Ideally, you should be listening more than talking. Instead, ask questions such as, how often do you work out? What keeps you from that goal? Tell me about a time you planned on going to work out but ended up not going. Always give the person you are interviewing the opportunity to talk about how they do things now or how they wish they did things and what they think can bridge the gap. May be, you will come across great ideas and opportunities you never expected.

Internet Research: This is most suited towards covering specific topics such as researching the industry or learning more about the market size.

Surveys: Surveys are most suited towards gathering quantitative data or rankings, such as determining the most important purchasing criteria for specific group of customers. This works best after an initial need is uncovered and verified, so that actionable and pointed questions to your customers can help you design your product.

CHOOSING A CUSTOMER

After your interviews, go through your notes to find the best opportunities. First, sort your notes by types of customers (gender, age, and difference in buying behavior). Find the key insight from each customer type. Next, you will then develop a customer persona, the one person within your target market who has the biggest unmet needs and who would be willing to spend time and money to find a solution. By targeting one type of person, everyone in your company will know who your product and services is for, and you will be able to refer back to and even talk to this person when you need to make decisions.

In this article, we have discussed the types of market research methods, how to conduct your interviews, the value of customer focus and how to develop your customer persona. In the next article, we will cover how to design your offerings. Thank you