Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Earning attention is the first battle.”
Customers today have many choices and little time. Before you earn their money, you have to earn their trust, and earning their trust starts with earning their attention.
Earning attention is NOT the same as grabbing, stealing, or buying attention with gimmicks, clickbait, or ads. While those things can be effective at driving attention to your product, keeping that attention is another story.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. The best way to earn attention is by nailing a problem.
Customers live in a noisy world and have learned to tune out solution pitches and lofty benefit claims.
What earns attention is problems, not solutions.
Describing your customer’s problems better than they can is a superpower. It’s the difference between rattling off symptoms or surface-level problems and getting to root causes.
II. Nailing a problem also earns trust.
Earning trust doesn’t need to wait until you deliver value to your customers. It starts with a “good” problem diagnosis.
When you describe a problem better than your customers,
- You create inherent value for them with your insights, and
- Your customers start viewing you as an expert.
This opens the door to pitching your product to a receptive audience.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Get clear on who’s it for (and not).
If you try and market your product to everyone, you end up talking to no one. Instead, hone in on a specific customer/problem early-adopter segment and craft your unique value proposition to attract that specific audience AND repel everyone else.
II. Deeply understand your early adopters better than they do.
Most people don’t take the time to introspectively study their problems. By immersing yourself in your customer’s world, and running carefully designed problem discovery studies, it is possible to uncover common patterns and root causes that lead to valuable problem insights.
Simply talking to customers or asking them about their problems is not enough. You have to know how.
III. Prioritize for problems worth solving.
There is no shortage of problems to solve. But not all problems are created equal.
Prioritize problems based on
- the current level of time, money, and effort spent, and
- the outcome gap you believe you can deliver.
These two anchors are key to crafting a compelling unique value proposition that earns attention and causes a switch.
That's all for today. See you next week.
Ash
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P.S.