Steve Blank’s Customer Development Methodology & Get Out Of The Building

by

Steve Blank is one of the most respected thinkers in the world of business today. Steve Blank is a Stanford business school professor, and an entrepreneur who has built three billion dollar companies earlier in his career. He is also an author of popular business books. Mr. Blank started in sales. He understood the power of talking to existing and potential customers about their current situation, their current needs, and what would make their situations easier or simpler.

As Mr. Blank moved forward along his career path, his convictions were consistently supported by the results of his sales, and the sales departments of which he was in charge. So he solidified his ideas into the Customer Development Methodology that is practiced by thousands of businesses today.

Let’s explain that methodology. Imagine that you are starting a business to sell some service to some type of companies. During the planning phases of this business, you will surely be wondering whether this will be an easy service to sell, and how needed that service is by those kinds of companies. Certainly you hope that this will be an easy service to sell. But how do you really know? History shows that to act on your hope and assumptions is an incredibly faulty strategy which will increase the chances of your business not being successful. The reason for that is because as entrepreneurs, we are

very hopeful and excited about our new business. And that skews our perception of reality, and blinds us.

Here is where the customer development methodology kicks in and helps us. The customer development methodology suggests that we literally or figuratively “get outside the building” and reach out to the people working at those companies, and begin conversations with them about how painful this painpoint really is to them, what their current solutions are to this painpoint, and what they might look for in any other services who solve that painpoint. You can also discuss how likely they would buy your services, and how much they would be able to pay for them.

Mind you, reaching out to the right people isn’t easy or simple. Most of the people you will reach out to will be busy and unwilling to help too much. It will also be a time consuming process filled with mediocre help and rejection. But you must persevere and eventually find individuals who will be open to engage in dialog with you about the prospects of selling your products or services to that company.

You must talk to as many different such companies as you can. Plus, make sure that the individuals you talk to are not junior-level employees, but rather people who can influence decisions, and who have sufficient vision of the needs of their business to give you reliable and insightful feedback. After you discuss the prospects of selling your product or service with many such companies, you will have done customer development, and your sense for your potential customer’s needs will be keenly developed. And you will have a very clear view of whether your business is a viable one, and how easy or difficult it will be to sell the product or service that you are planning to provide.

Further Business Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app.  Additionally, here is the iOS marketing app. And here is the Android marketing app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.

Author: Alex Genadinik

by