By Anne
Reijns &Dr. Sumiti Saharan
Product
development is a very exciting, time consuming stage in any business.It sits at
the very coreof your business. Many books have been written about it and blogs
abound with the five things to do to make a great product. Be customer-centric,
use agile methodologies, hire the best people, do continuous user-testing,
data-driven feature development. Amidst all the catch-phrases, many
entrepreneurs underestimate the complexity, time and money it takes to get your
product to your customers. We were no different. Our product was great, and we
have been great at owning customer-centricity but our Go-To-Market Strategy
delayed our timeline with over 2 months. Let us help you prevent the same
pitfalls we made!
Where is
your customer?
In our
case, we had a very limited time to attract our customer (we provide digital
and offline healthcare services for pregnant women). Only in the first 6 months
of pregnancy would the service make a difference for the mother. For us, to get
back our investment, we needed to hook the mother in the first 3 months of her
pregnancy.
Yet
typically, women only come in for their first pregnancy checkup around the 8th
week, which brings us to our challenge no.1: we have less than a month to truly
attract the mother to our services.
First where
do we find the mother-to-be in this time frame? There was no predictable
concrete touchpoint to access a pregnant mother other than the hospital, the
lab or the pharmacy, thereby limiting our marketing channels.This also meant we
had to onboard these stakeholders as marketing partners, which cost us extra
time. Our customer in India also barely searches online for pregnancy
information or services. Second, profiling educated consumers with smartphones
as ones that can be reached with online marketing is inaccurate. A very small
percentage of digitally enabled customers search for health information online.
Knowing this, we were not able to harness the power of online marketing for our
product. However, even to the proportion of people we did reach through online
marketing, the conversion rates turned out to be much lower than anticipated –
The Indian consumers mistrusts the digital interface for healthcare decisions.
Learning
number 1: Market where your customer is and is open to think about your service.
Get the required partners and reach well-up front to be able to do so! You will
lose valuable time if you only start developing your marketing channels after
your product is ready to go.
What
does your customer want to hear?
Pregnancy
is a volatile state. You are excited and happy, but also nervous and stressed.
There are so many questions, too much information to make sense of, a lack of
quality healthcare providers and too many costs.Our product was built exactly
for these problems together with pregnant women and providers.
Even though
our product was right, we were not able to get in touch with enough mothers
once the product was ready to be sold. Our research and user-testing suggested
that we were solving their biggest problem,but they were not interested enough
to start a conversation with us. Even by giving free information, nutrition
counselling or discountswe could not attract the mother`s attention and thus we
were not able to sell our product. She recognised the problems are the right
problems, but did not want to hear about how we solved all her problems, she
just wanted one problem, her immediate problem, to be solved at that moment. That
problem differed per mother, per moment and thus was hard to market for.
We had to
change our marketing strategy. Instead of us telling her how we solve her
problem, we let her tell us what she wanted and then we solved her problem. We
did not name our services. We listened and offered the solution. Operationally,
the solution was the same, just the go-to-market strategy was different. This is
working but didcause our sales cycle to be much longer than expected. Instead
of immediately talking to the mother about our app or healthcare services, we had
to slowly built a connection. Only then our services came into the picture.
Learning
number 2: Listen to your customer. How does she want to be addressed, when does
she want to be talked to, and about what does she want to talk. And solve onlywhat
she is asking forthen.Only after that you can market a novel product or
idea.
Did you
test your go-to-market assumptions?
We tested
our app many times, before and during design and development. We checked
whether they knew how to log-in, whether they understood the user interface,
the graphics, the language, the content. Yes we failed to sufficiently test one
core assumption: How does the app get onto their phone and more importantly how
do they reach us. This had a huge impact on our Go-to-Market Strategy.
We knew
women did not know how to navigate app download through Google playstore and
that they are most comfortable with Whatsapp. and as such we had planned to send
them a link on whatsappto download. It took us a long time to figure out that
women do not know how to send a whatsapp message if the phone number is not
already in their contact list and they do not know how to create a new contact.
In case of
offline marketing, getting women to type a link did not work (as we had feared),
as women did not know where to type the link. In other words, we had to go back
to the basics: a phone call.This prolonged the sales cycle, as well as
increased our operational effort significantly. It took us 3 months to figure
all of this out. In these three months, we tried over 7 types of marketing channels
and over 30 types of messaging / tone of voice / colours / branding /CTAs before we figured out that our most
simple CTA (which we thought could not be made simpler) was the problem.
Learning
number 3: Study the behaviour of your consumer. Every step, and not just the
one pertaining to usage of your product. You will not change their behaviour, so
reach them the way they want to. Do not make assumptions about your
go-to-market strategy. No assumption is too simple to test.
Start
your Go-To-Market Strategy immediately
Maybe your
Go-To-Market strategy is even more important than your product development.
Without enough customers you cannot assess the value or impact of your product.
Whereas, if you have enough customers, you can iterate an awful product in a
good one. It is your Go-to-Market strategy that needs an agile approach,
user-testing, your best people and data-driven decisions.
For us,
these lessons have been invaluable. We refocussed our energy from product
development to building and testing our Go-To-Market strategy. And as we begin
to find answers, we hope you will put your on-paper go-to market strategy to
the same rigour of testing and optimizing that you gave to your product.
About DR. Sumiti Saharan
Sumiti is Design and Research Director at Avegen. She is a
Neuroscientist with near fifteen years of experience in scientific thinking and
research & design. She holds a doctorate at Queensland Brain Institute,
University in Queensland, Australia. Sumiti has had a scientific career with
several research publications and several awards and fellowships.
About Anne Reijns
Anne Reijns is the Commercial
Lead Maternal Health at Avegen and responsible for our work in Maternal Health
(Together for Her). Based in Mumbai, she
has a background in Digital Health care and eCommerce. Prior to joining Avegen,
she has worked in Germany and United States. She holds a master’s degree in
marketing management and entrepreneurship from Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
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