#1: GoSquared’s co-founder and CEO, James Gill (@jamesgill), on the constant, focussed labour of talking to customers and how that can help “differentiate and demonstrate value in a game-changing way.” (Source)
In terms of clarifying how you’re differentiating, I think always the best thing to do is to speak to your customers – to not assume you know why customers buy from you, and to not purely use metrics to understand.
You have to get on a Zoom call, you have to spend a good 30 mins+ and ask them to talk about themselves, listen to them, and understand why they came to you. I think people often want a push button solution to solve this – “Just tell me in 2 words why you chose to use GoSquared!” – but it’s never as simple as that to start with.
Perhaps ultimately you can get to a point where you have a set of 5 “key reasons” why customers choose you, why you’re differentiated, but that’s not the starting point. The starting point is spending time listening to customers, and hearing thousands of their own words about why they chose your solution.
By doing that hard work, you learn the language your customers speak, you learn about the place you occupy in their busy lives, you build a comprehension of how to speak back to them. And it’s through that listening, acting, and iterating that you build that beautiful “hand in glove” fit to ensure you build something your customers want, and pitch it to future customers in a delightful, enticing way.
This stuff is of course really hard, but I think I’d just underline: there are almost never shortcuts. You don’t AB test your way to success and create a differentiated, category-defining business.
You have to use your gut, you have to be extremely creative, and you have to get on Zoom (and maybe one day again: outside the building!) and talk to prospects and customers specifically to learn from them, not to pitch to them.
Once you build that into your habits and routine, you build a machine that can differentiate and demonstrate value in a game-changing way.