Your market: Brute force vs accuracy

Buyers in a market are people who have a need and have money to spend on satisfying that need.  They are not a “market”.  In other words, trying to research if there are 5 million people who all spend $100 on something is misguided attempt to determine if there is a market.  Tying to get 5 people to buy is knowing if there is a market for your product.

There are several ways to approach finding a market:  1. Get lucky 2. Call everyone who you think could possibly have the need your product serves or 3. Make enough noise to attract people who have to need – to you.  By the way, getting lucky is nice, but not a business strategy.

The goal is, to as accurately as possible, identify customers who are likely to need your product.  The best way to get to that level of accuracy is to have customers self-identify and come to you.  That’s where marketing is important.

However, another way is to go down the brute-force approach – which is to manually contact every possible buyer in an area you’ve identified as one that has a need.  Not very fun, or glamorous, and very time consuming – but there are other values here.

While marketing and self-selecting customers are the most desirable, I’d argue that for a company with a new kind of product or service that brute-force is actually rather important.  With brute force, every customer you contact will tell you something important about your “market”.

The ones that say “no” will give you valuable feedback on why not (even if you have to interpret), the ones that say “maybe” will be very valuable in determining the triggers that get them to buy (when and if they do buy) and the ones that say “yes”; well – we just like those, but they become the most important for understanding how your product meets a need.

Finding the right sales approach is tricky

B2B sales should be about adding value and solving a customer’s pain – not about pushing product.  That means that you need to understand your customer intimately. Their needs must be crystal clear and your answer must hit those needs squarely on the pain point.

However, that necessarily means 1. you’ve got to get to know your customers really well and 2. you have to really figure out what their pain is and how you solve it (and solve it better than anyone else).   Both of which are not easy.

It’s easy to feel like you’re a burden to a potential customer or even a good customer.  It’s easy to not really understand a customer – and skip trying to understand because you feel like a burden.  But – if you’re really trying to solve their problem, then they hopefully will sense that – and treat you more as a consultant than a sales rep.  But – that’s a hard act to pull off.  And that gets even harder when a customer does not even realize that have a pain that is easily solvable.

We focus on understanding our customers as much as possible, sometimes educating them where needed and always working to solve the problem they have.

Quality is not necessarily an incremental item

Often, when we think of increases in quality (whether that is software, video, errors, etc), we think that’s an incremental gain.  Meaning, quality is a continuous curve that additional effort or planning will get you more of.

In the case of online live video, that’s not entirely true.  There is a fairly important jump between the quality of encoding within a software context (eg: on your laptop) and with the addition of hardware processing (eg: with rVibe’s appliance).  To get from decent, but not fantastic quality to really good or great quality, it requires a substantial change in process and technology.  Of course, than may change in years to come, but for now it’s true.

And this is the rub:  not everything can be done with moderate quality video.  For example – if you need to see something on screen that has a lot of detail and motion – like a medical device, or a computing part, or surgery, you have to have hardware based encoding to have it be effective. Otherwise it’s just lost in the mush of lower processing based live video – and that is plain yucky.

Quality is not always incremental – sometimes it has to be a certain level to just plain work – and sometimes, achieving that level takes a big step in technology.

Which of course, is where rVibe comes in.