Draw a Straight Line From Your Customer to What You Sell

I’m going to give you the straight goods (mind the pun) on keeping your customers and your offers tightly coupled, because sales.

I used to work with startups in the academic world, building fast-growing companies out of their big ideas. Well, that was the idea, anyway. While attitude and discipline make the difference between those that make it and those that don’t, if your offer and your customers are not aligned, all the hard work ethic in the world won’t save you.

When I take a startup through its business model design, we follow a pretty rigid process to ensure this alignment happens. All of this translates to other types of businesses as well, whether you are building a high growth startup, a small bricks and mortar business, an online service-based business or any other model.

The foundation is simple.

Your customer is motivated to make a purchase based on one of two things:

Pains they are having trying to get a specific “job” done.

Or:

Visions of a better life in some small or significant way.

The former is problem-based and deals with real-time challenges and the latter is future focused and could be considered more complementary and luxury.

Do the analysis on both. Look at your customers and figure out what those jobs are that they are trying to get done. (Think “jobs”, such as “things I need to get done” vs “where I punch my time card”).

Then, determine what challenges they have getting those jobs done, and what they stand to gain if those jobs are done, and done well. Determine the future state.

Now, turn around and look at that offer/those offers you’ve designed. What does your customer stand to gain from your offers? What benefits will they enjoy from your product or services?

Now, literally, draw a line from those benefits and match each one of them up with a pain or a gain that your customer has or wants to achieve.

If you can’t draw a line between those two, you need to rethink one or the other. Because ain’t nobody gonna buy something that doesn’t give them something else.
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Tell me in the comments…

Are your offers aligned with your customers’ pains and gains?