2.2 - Four Steps to Revelation

FOUR STEPS TO REVELATION:

The purpose of this training is to provide you with the strategies of creating services/products that WIN!

The old way of building {Product development model} companies was the following:

1. Concept stage: A founder turns his passion and vision into a business plan, makes a hypothesis for the service/product needed to be built, makes a hypothesis on the customers who will buy the product and where they can be found, makes a hypothesis on how they’ll reach the customer and finally, this leads to some basic assumptions on pricing.
2. Product/service development: The founder and his team get to work, start building the product/service, start building their marketing and promotion programs, start building sales assets, start targeting first customers.
3. Alpha/Beta Test: Marketing launches a full communication plan, sales signs up the first beta customers and the organization decides to scale the sales team.
4. Launch: Product/service launches and the company goes into full crazy spending mode, building sales channels and supporting marketing.

The issue with going through this process when building your business is that you forget one thing, the most important thing, which is Customer and market development.

What’s wrong with the old way:

• Prioritize building your product/service instead of developing your customers and market
• Believe that customers are going to appear from nowhere and keep coming.
• Don’t notice that trial and error is going to run you out of $ and run you out of business
• Spending and hiring as if success was guaranteed, due to projections and forecasts.

Most companies fail not because they lack a good product or service, they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model!

The Four steps to Revelation are meant to help you avoid any huge loss of time/money and provide you with huge probabilities of success.

The main difference between the Customer development model (CDM) and the product development model (PDM) is that it doesn’t assume that everything will be as forecast, each step of the CDM is drawn as a circular track because, unlike the PDM, it understands that the process is iterative, finding the right customers and the right market won’t happen on the first attempt.

The customer development model assumes that it will take several iterations of each of the four steps until you get right.

The four are steps are the following:

1. Customer Discovery: the goal of this step is to find out who the customer/niche is and whether the problem you believe you are solving for them is important to them.

You need to prove if your niche, problem, and offer hypothesis are correct, and the only way of doing this is to get “outside the building” in order to gather feedback from the market about your product/service & problem, and ideal customer.

1. Customer Validation: The goal of this step is to prove that you have a set of customers and a niche that reacts positively to your service/product.

Validation happens when you’re able to relieve your customers of some of their money, once that’s done then you focus on building a sales roadmap, a playbook of the proven and repeatable sales process that has been field-tested by successfully selling your product/service to customers.

1. Customer creation: It’s at this step that you fire up all engines. After getting a few sales in and proving/validating your hypothesis, you’re supposed to go heavy on marketing to create demand for your service/product and drive that demand into your sales channels.
2. Company building: At this stage, you transition out of the learning and discovery phase, and start building different departments in your company.

HOW TO APPLY THIS TO YOUR AGENCY/ONLINE SERVICE BUSINESS

STEP 1: CUSTOMER DISCOVERY PROCESS:

1. Make a hypothesis about a problem you’re solving and about a niche.
2. Find your potential customers, interview them/ask them questions in order to find out if the problem you believe you are solving is important to them.
3. Gather the feedback from the customer and iterate your main hypotheses.

STEP 2: CUSTOMER VALIDATION PROCESS:

1. Go back to some of the prospects you spoke to and new ones, invite them to a discovery call/sales call.
2. Sell 1 to 3 customers to your service, this will validate everything. ( If you can’t sell, go back to Step 1 and come up with a new hypothesis.)
3. Build out a workflow/ a repeatable sales process from the steps you took to sign up these new customers.

STEP 3: CUSTOMER CREATION:

1. Launch an outbound prospecting campaign & a paid advertising campaign ( If you have the budget)
2. Hire appointment setters/virtual assistants and closers.
3. Create a seamless onboarding process in order for you to handle the volume.

STEP 4: COMPANY BUILDING:

1. Build out the service delivery department ( media buyers, etc)
2. Hire someone who can take care of your accounting, bookkeeping, etc
3. Hire someone to take care of Operations
4. Promote your best sales rep to the sales manager