Want to streamline your business efforts and grow faster at the same time? Then focus your business design on your key customer target straight away. Be bold, slice off the others … here are my examples where multiple customer segments nearly sunk these businesses. Support Diary of a Business Designer Key takeaways You can read all about segmentation and how to focus on specific customers in most marketing, business model, lean canvas, and design thinking books. The bottom-line premise is: Different groups have different needs, different problemsThey use different mediums and channels to purchaseThey have differing buyer behavior's, demographics, and personasDiffering common interests, social drivers, criteria, experience expectations and so on Whatever the need for your desperation to find more customers, it cant be said more than 100 times by all market gurus out there … Focus on one customer, one type, one category, delight a person of one, and create the perfect the experience for that one until you get it right And if that doesn’t work, let go and move onto the next customer type, or maybe you got desperate for a good reason .. and something else needs to seriously change. WASTE ONE: … what happens when you chase all customers and delight none. WASTE TWO: …when you mix up the value proposition. In two companies, a start-up and a scale-up I worked with .. they both struggled with spreading the message widely across multiple audience groups. The first example was a scale-up. They were trying to meet the needs of current investors, the Board, advocacy groups, end-users, HR professionals, c-suite, two different industry targets, health professionals and provide public health information. Fast forward 2 years, the target audience has been re-focused into 3 purposeful groups: potential funders, health professional advisors and for impact advocacy. From 12 to 3, revenue began to lift, and profitability and stress levels improved. Frenetic desperation versus a focused measured path. The second example, a start-up. Over time, the desire to gain investment began to move the focus of the target audience away from the end-user customer and their experience, towards investor demographics and needs. The business was forgetting to delight the end-user audience of one and over several years end-user repeat business began to falter. Fast forward two years, we creating two separate distinct audiences, with separate websites and messaging .. and the result was yielding far better outcomes. In summary .. carve out a primary focus audience, once that one succeeds, then move onto the next. Good reads on Amazon The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank, the guru of customer development! Value Proposition Design – Strategyzer Timestamps: [00:49] What is segmentation?[01:29] The desperation factor[02:41] Waste 1 – Chasing all customers[04:01] Waste 2 – Mixed propositions[06:02] Example 1 – a scale-up[07:46] Example 2 – a start-up[09:26] Be bold
