A discovery process to understand: what’s valuable to the customer; create a Go-To-Market strategy; prove a profitable, sustainable business model as quickly as possible.

1. “launching a product is the most expensive
market research you can do”

2. Customer and Market Validation
A discovery process to understand:
 What’s valuable to the customer
 Create a Go-To-Market strategy
 Prove a profitable, sustainable business model
as quickly as possible

3. When to do a Customer/Market
Validation?
 Preferably as soon as you have the idea and before
developing a product or service
 If a product or service is already launched and sales
are not what you expected then NOW, before hiring a
new team, re-launching or re-developing the product

4. What does it answer?
 What problem/s we are setting out to solve?
 What’s their scale and importance - is the
solution a ‘must have’ or merely ‘important’?
 How to find customers?
 What positioning resonates best?
 Who will buy and how will they buy?
 How much will they pay to solve their problem?
 How can you create a scalable business?

5. How’s it done?
Via a 5 Stage Process:
1. Review of existing planning, strategy,
research and demos
2. Run Process Preparation meetings –
brainstorming to extract and evaluate hypotheses,
qualify opportunities based on compelling business
criteria
3. Pre-screening interviews and recruiting -
screening of targets and arrangement of meetings
4. Customer/market validation meetings - with
potential buyers/key decision makers
5. Go-To-Market strategy – including sales roadmap

6. Hypotheses –
create, test, validate, change, repeat… for
each:
 Product Hypothesis -
 Problem Hypothesis we’re selling this product – not
 Positioning Hypothesis this product plus lots of custom
features!
 Value Prop Hypothesis  Pricing Hypothesis
 Differentiation Hypothesis  Sales/Distribution
 Market Hypothesis Hypothesis
 Market Type Hypothesis  Exit Hypothesis

7. Example Hypothesis: Market Type
Your market must be one of:
 new product to existing market?
 new product to new market?
 new product to existing market and trying to
re-segment that market?
Each market type has different cash needs,
rates of customer adoption and acceptance or
requires different sales and marketing
strategies

8. Example Hypothesis : Pricing
 If customers don’t ask about price, they
probably don’t understand the product
concept or aren’t interested in buying it…
 Pricing research has a very high ROI and
very valuable payback in confidence
 Goal is not just price, but to find out what
drives value in the customers’ minds…

9. Need Help Designing or
Executing a Customer &
Market Validation Process?
Jeffdrust@comcast.net
+1 650 208 5771
Skype: jeffdrust
www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdrust

10. “We hired Jeff as an expert in the CAD
market who could give us advice on our
product and marketing plans. We have
been extremely satisfied with his work in
this regard. … His marketing
recommendations have proven to be right
on target.”
“Jeff helped to solidify our go-to-market
strategy and align it better with our
customers for long term success. His deep
Testimonials knowledge and structured methodology is
of the highest caliber of any individual that I
have worked with.”
“Jeff came highly recommended to me as
a leader in market strategy and business
model development. Jeff led the market
validation process for our IT start-up. He is
an incredibly organized, motivated and
meticulous professional.”
“Jeff has been working with our company
on a number of critical initiatives including
helping to create and focus our market
strategy, execute our market research and
product validation. Jeff has been one of the
most professional executives and
consultants with whom I have ever dealt.”