Product Management: How do I get customers?

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello, and welcome to the bottom Mount skills podcast. I might pass since I'm the CEO of Qualitas and we are at the second last episode of our unstuck series, and we are asking a mighty. Big question. This question trips up a lot of startups. In fact, a lot of grown-up companies get stumped on this one.

And the question is, how do I get customers for my product or service? Now it is, um, really. A big challenge because we often spend so much time working on designing and building the product that we often neglect this question. And in the previous episode, we talked about the launch strategies, which was really the start of.

Getting some customers, but I want to give you a framework that will help for not only getting customers, but in the last episode, in the next one, after this, we'll ask, how do you keep customers? But we're going to break the [00:01:00] customer question up into two parts, and we're going to talk about how we get customers.

And we're going to use some thinking that is growth marketing. Inspired now you might've heard of growth hacking growth marketing. Let me tell you a little bit about those. And then I'm going to give you three key questions that represent three steps in the growth marketing funnel. So growth marketing is quite disruptive in the world of marketing and advertising because.

The historical way that the marketing world has sort of tackled, um, you know, launching products and selling products is they try and make as many people as possible aware and, uh, tell them to go to a destination or to a retailer. Um, and this is kind of what we call the top of the funnel, but what's really quite interesting is that growth marketing is enormously [00:02:00] disruptive because it says, well, that's only.

Like one third of the funnel, there's still another two thirds. And in fact, the only way to think about the funnel is in whole. So you think about the end to end cycle, that customers, that audience, um, go through when they actually experience a product or a service. And, um, so much money gets spent on the awareness and the reach stage in traditional marketing, that growth marketing is like, Oh no, no, no.

We run the full funnel. And every step of the way in this funnel is a key moment of conversion. So conversion is the magical thing inside the funnel. This funnel is made up of six steps and at each step you're looking to convert as best as possible. So I'm going to introduce to you the funnel and we're going to use the first three steps in the funnel.

Uh, to tackle, how do I get customers? And we're going to use the last three steps on how we keep [00:03:00] customers. So this is going to be great. So make sure you've listened to, by this episode in the following one. If you want to see the whole funnel, it's kind of big. So I thought for the podcast, let's make it two parts.

Okay. So you got a funnel and you want to reach as many people as possible and go through a series of conversions with them. So I'm going to break it down. Um, but first let's talk about the name of this funnel. This is called. The pirate funnel. The one that I use it is called the pirate funnel because when you actually take the acronym of the six steps in the funnel, it's are just like a good pirate.

So it's a R R R. That is the pirate funnel. The first three A's stand for awareness, acquisition and activation. Okay. Now they all come in a logical sequence, so let's break them down and let's talk about. What really matters in each of these stages. So awareness let's imagine [00:04:00] we're running. Um, and, uh, we've built a SAS software as a service product, and that's the context of these questions.

So we've got the product. We've just launched now we're on the mission to go get customers. So the first step is asking ourselves what's the awareness look like? How many people do we reach? And for me, the, the key key key thing here is it's all about. Being present in, in the case of a SAS startup, it starts with Google.

Um, so the key question is how many people are you reaching? Are you even in Google? And you start to see here, that awareness starts with being find-able to being. Present out there in the world because you know, so many people forget, even some of the basics of what is crucial to making sure that people are even aware of you.

So let's go through like a win. [00:05:00] Um, and then this is really where you build your brand. So you're going to want to make sure you're on a you're indexed on Google, but also you're going to find all sorts of marketplaces to launch a product like product hunt or beta list. Want to be in there. Step further.

You, if you're a SAS, you can list yourself in all sorts of directories, um, where people review SAS products, G2 being one of the bigger players. So awareness is all about being listed. Uh, if you're running paid, how many impressions do you get? Um, you know, you're really looking, uh, For SEO as being a big practice in your awareness.

The other thing here is that as you get more mature, you do want to see some more sophisticated advertising things like retargeting. And if you're on directories or review sites, you might even have affiliate partnerships to drive that reach. So that's really the top of the funnel. So [00:06:00] that's a witness that we're talking about.

So once you've got that awareness, you need to drive people to your website. This is what we call acquisition. So as you start looking at the acquisition part, this is like, okay, how many people are visiting, visiting our site? So, um, you might see people, um, turning up, uh, visiting your site, bouncing on your site.

You want to start looking at what content they're looking at. Um, you know, what are the. Um, uh, what are the things that their behaviors that they're doing on your site really starting to discover? What's interesting. A big clue here would be, um, What is the most popular content on your site? What's getting the most indexing from search, obviously.

Um, you know, we shouldn't forget part of the awareness is social media, so you should be on LinkedIn and Facebook and all those millions of other social networks. You really want to be driving that engagement with your content, [00:07:00] um, with your services and then comes the next big step. This is activation activation is super important because it activation your really presenting your customers with the first step in the relationship.

This could be a trial. This could be a freemium signup. Um, this could be some sort of request to fund demonstration. Um, this could be any sort of metric that you have for activating the customers. The first step. It's not necessarily the full value in a transaction, but it could be something that feeds into your funnel.

Maybe it's a webinar who knows. But what you see here is this clear funnel, awareness, acquisition, and activation. And the key question for each of those goes, how many people did I reach? How many people visit our website [00:08:00] and how many people take the first step? Now, what you'll notice is obviously there's going to be some attrition here.

So. And, you know, if you reach a hundred people, you might get 22 website and only five take the first step that's okay. Because there, you see the conversion rates and your job in terms of getting customers is to improve those conversion rates obsess on the conversion rates, make those numbers better.

And that'll force you to come up with innovative new ways to engage your customers, to drive them through the funnel, to drive them through the funnel, better, more efficiently to create more value for you as a business who this is a big one. How do I ge...