How do we align what people want and what we’re offering?
A great way of aligning your offering with what clients want is to build an ideal international client profile, based on a single segment. This profile delves into the client’s goals, challenges and desires, to help us get clear on what clients are trying to do, what problems they are facing and what outcomes they want. This information helps us to understand what sorts of products and services we should be offering to clients.
- Goals - what clients are trying to get done, in their work and in their lives,
- Challenges - the problems and obstacles that they are facing as they try to achieve their goals
- Desires - what outcomes clients want to achieve, or the concrete benefits that they are seeking
Goals
Goals are the things that your clients are trying to get done in their work or their life. A client goal could be:
- the tasks they are trying to perform and complete at work,
- the problems they are trying to solve at home,
- or personal needs that they are trying to satisfy.
When you’re thinking about goals, make sure that you take the client’s perspective – what you think of as important might not be a goal for your client.
Challenges
Challenges are anything that annoys your clients before, during and after trying to achieve a goal, or anything that prevents them from reaching their goal.They can also be risks or potentially negative outcomes, related to not achieving a goal.
Desires are the outcomes and benefits that your customers want. Some of these things are required, expected or desired by clients and some would surprise them. Desires can include functional utility, social gains, positive emotions, and cost savings.
Goals, challenges and desires can all vary in their importance, severity and relevance. While your clients may have a variety of goals, challenges and desires and although individual customer preferences vary, it’s very important to get a sense of which of things really matter the most to clients, so that you can make sure that the products you are putting into the market help them to achieve their most important goals, solve their most important challenges and fulfil their most relevant desires.
Go to the source
There are several ways that you can source the information for your ideal client profile, including:
Interviews
Draw up a list of questions and call your clients and potential clients directly for their input. This is a great way to get a deep understanding of what people are looking for, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
Focus group
This is a tactic used by big firms, and can yield deep insights into what clients are looking for and how they feel about products. The downside is that they are complex to coordinate and can be expensive to run.
Create surveys
You can survey clients using tools like Survey Monkey, virtually for free and this method has the advantage of being quick and inexpensive. The downside is that response rates to surveys are usually very low and the quality of data is often lower, because the format is inflexible.
Run a poll on social media
Like surveys, social media polls are a ‘quick and dirty’ way of getting feedback from prospects. They’re quick and inexpensive, but don’t provide nuanced data about clients’ goals, challenges and desires.
Commission professional market research
This can include interviews, surveys and focus groups. Professional research is more expensive than DIY research, but the advantage is that you can leave the hard work to experienced researchers who know how to find the data you need.
Interested in commissioning market research for your international expansion? Find out how we help companies gain deep insights into their target markets, through qualitative and quantitative international market research and modelling.
In the end, whichever method you choose, it all comes down to this: ask people what they are trying to do, what they struggle with and what they need.
Dig for concrete information
To clearly differentiate between your prospects, goals, challenges and desires, get people to describe them as concretely as possible.
For example, when a customer says “waiting in line was a waste of time”, ask after how many minutes exactly it began to feel like a waste of time. That way, you can note “wasting more than X minutes standing in line”. When you understand how clients measure the severity of inconvenience, you can design better ways to solve their problems.
As you go through this process, you’ll discover that what matters to your clients and potential clients overseas is often quite different to what matters to clients in your domestic market.
What if I don’t have a list of potential international clients?
If you’re starting cold, with no list of international prospects, an interim solution is to begin creating your ideal client profile with your best guess as to what is important to your future customers. The caveat is that you’ll need to test those assumptions to make sure they truly reflect priorities from the client’s perspective, before you’ve invested a lot of time and money in a particular strategy. If this seems like a daunting task, it could be time to commission some professional research.
In my next post, I’ll be covering how to create your ideal client avatar, by putting everything we’ve discussed so far together.
