Most marketing people will tell you that nothing is more important or compelling when launching a product than to have a solid set of reference customers (or reference applications for a platform product). Yet it continually amazes me how many products launch with none.
If at launch there are a half-dozen marquee names publicly stating their use and satisfaction with a product, then the job of the sales and marketing folks is dramatically easier, as the greatest risk the potential customer faces is dramatically reduced. On the other hand, if good reference customers are missing, all the creative marketing and clever sales tactics in the world will only take you so far. If there are no references, this is a huge red flag, and it usually means the product is either bad, or not yet ready for prime time. And you don’t want to be the first to try to use it.
If there’s only one or a few reference sites, I worry that what’s been built is essentially a special, or custom solution, and that it won’t be generally useful.
Note that this applies whether we’re talking a platform technology, a business application, or even a consumer Internet service. Potential customers need to know that this product really works for people like them.
Now let’s move for a moment from our focus on the launch to the very beginning of the project.
As product manager, you know your job is to gain a deep understanding of your target customer, the problems to be solved, and whether you can come up with a product that meets these needs. You know you need to work closely and directly with customers to develop a product that will meet the needs of hundreds of customers (and thousands—or even millions—of users), but you also know there aren’t enough hours in the day to work directly with this many customers.
My favorite technique for addressing both of these problems—getting deep insight into my target customers, and having great reference customers at launch—is to use a charter user program (also known as a Customer Advisory Board, Customer Council, or Voice of the Customer). This is not a new technique (I did my first at HP about 20 years ago), and many companies do this. But I’m surprised how many do not.
The program is fairly straightforward. Your goal is to end with at least six happy, live, referenceable customers from your target market. That means you’ll probably need to start with 8-10. So your job is to recruit these customers right at the start of your project. You’re looking for customers in your target market who would make great references. They may be from your existing customer base, or
prospects, or often a blend of both. The key is that they believe this is a real problem to solve and they need it solved as quickly as possible.
Here’s the deal:
The benefits to the customers/users that join:
They get early and significant product input—they recognize the problem that this product is trying to solve, they feel the pain, and are anxious to ensure they find a good solution
They get early access to the product—again, they feel the pain, so the sooner they can get relief the better
Typically, there is a significantly reduced cost, if any
The benefits to you:
You have a set of users and customers available for ongoing questions and dialog
You have access to the customer’s offices and the users at that company (or the company’s developers if it’s a platform product)
The customers/users agree to come to your offices periodically for group sessions
The customer agrees to deploy test versions promptly and provide timely feedback (you’ll typically be there with them)
If they are happy with the delivered product, the customer agrees to serve as a public reference customer
A few critical points:
It’s important that the customer not pay in advance to participate in this program. That would make this a very different type of relationship. You want a partner in developing the product— you do not want to build a custom solution just for them, and you’re not a project shop. You can take their money after you deliver them a product they love.
If you’re like most companies, you will be overwhelmed with customers that want to participate. It really is a great deal, and customers know this. If you have a sales organization, they’ll try to use this as a bargaining chip, and the result is that you’ll be leaned on to include many more customers than you can handle. This will take finesse at times, but it’s important that the members of the charter user program be the right set. (Sometimes companies create an early release program that is available for those customers that want the software early, but aren’t right for the charter user program. This is fine. Just make sure you don’t accept more than about 10 customers into the charter user program as you won’t be able to manage them and work as closely as you need to with that many.)
If you find that you are having real trouble recruiting charter users and customers, then it’s very likely you are chasing a problem that isn’t that important, and you will probably have a very hard time selling this product. This is one of the very first reality checks to make sure you are spending your time on something worthwhile. If customers aren’t interested in this problem, you may want to rethink your plans.
You need to make sure your charter users and customers are truly from your target market. It’s easy to end up with early adopters, who are much more tolerant and can easily lead to a product of interest only to early adopters (See the chapter Emotional Adoption Curve).
You will need to explain to each member of the program that you are trying to come up with a general product—something you can successfully sell to a large number of customers. You’re not trying to build a custom solution that works only for that particular company, and they wouldn’t really want that in any case (because if you can’t build a real business with that product, you’ll go under and they’ll be left with unsupported, dead-end software). You are, however, deeply committed to coming up with a product that works very well for them.
You need to think of these charter users and customers as development partners. You’re in this together. You need to treat them as colleagues. You are helping each other. You’ll find that the relationships you create can last for decades.
You will be interacting with these people throughout the project lifecycle—you’ll be showing them prototypes and testing with their users, you’ll be asking hundreds of detailed questions, and you’ll be testing release candidates in their environment.
Make sure you release the software to these people before the general release, and make sure they are live and happy before the public release. When you launch, they’ll be ready to stand up for you.
You’ll likely be working very closely with product marketing on preparing the charter customer to be a public reference, and they’ll often help with finding these partners as well.
If your product is a platform product (others will write and deliver applications on top of your product), then this program is especially critical. The main difference is that you want to focus on ending the program with six reference applications rather than six customers. And you’ll need to work closely with your application partners to ensure that the applications they build on your platform are also successful with their users (and a great way to do that is to encourage them to have charter users).
Note that while many of my examples are for customers in an enterprise software or a platform product sense, these techniques also work with end-users for consumer Internet services and consumer devices. For consumer services, you will want to expand the set to 10-15 or so, but the key is to really get to know these people and the environment in which they will be using your product— home or office. It is all too easy when designing a site for consumers to not have enough exposure to true target users until very late in the process (beta or even launch). This is very dangerous, and a program like this helps keep the product manager focused on providing real value to real users. In terms of marketing, when consumers decide to buy or use a product, they may not look at reference customers the same way a business purchaser would, but consumers are influenced by the press and user review sites, and when the press writes a story about your product, the first thing they’ll look for is real users.
This really is an easy and powerful technique to ensure that you’re building a product that customers want, and that you can prove to prospective customers that they’re likely to be successful and happy if they go with you.